Don’t like the way ice skating makes your ankles feel all sweaty and confined? Learned your lesson when you suggested “Saw II” for a first date? If you’re itching for a season-appropriate romantic outing, John Cariani has the solution – a shaggy, snowy charmer of a play called “Almost, Maine.”

Until now, Mr. Cariani – the young actor-playwright best known for his water-limbed, somewhat neurotic take on the tailor Motel in the “Fiddler on the Roof” revival – would have seemed an unlikely expert on the ways of the heart. But if you can get past his penchant for whimsy, these nine tales of love in the time of frostbite have a winning glow that proves surprisingly contagious. You may never again see so much snow and feel so warm.

Mr. Cariani and director Gabriel Barre make only the slightest nod to linking the play’s nine stories: Beyond casually dropping the name of a character from an earlier piece, the playlets stand on their own. The only common thread is that they all take place on the same evening in the same Maine town – which technically isn’t a town.

“We never got around to getting organized, so … we’re just Almost,” one character explains, and this seems right. The Almosters seem to shrug their way into everything they do, which usually involves falling either into or out of love.

A common trope of romantic comedy is the “meet cute” scene.Well, the pining souls of Almost meet cute, woo cute, sit cute, and even fight cute. Two of the actors – Todd Cerveris and the invaluable Finnerty Steeves – are quirky cute. The other two – Justin Hagan and Miriam Shor – are cute cute. (These four actors, who play 19 roles, get help throughout from composer Julian Fleisher’s intelligent folk-pop songs, which deserve a life beyond the Daryl Roth Theatre.)

What leaps out most intensely from “Almost, Maine” are not the “Northern Exposure”-esque eccentricities but something far more unusual: Most of the characters seem to like each other. In today’s popular entertainment, happy couples exist largely to endure a tragedy that spurs grief, recriminations, or revenge. All is not rosy in Almost, but perhaps because each digest-size scene can get away with traversing a shorter emotional arc, Mr. Cariani is willing to let some of his couples start out fond of each other and end up even more smitten.

As the play’s title might have warned you, Mr. Cariani’s weakness for preciosity occasionally gets the best of him. This manifests itself most frequently in snippets of magic reality: A woman carries her broken heart in a balled-up paper bag, two characters repeatedly lose the ability to stand up as they fall in love, a man shrinks from grief, and that sort of thing. Some of these work better than others – the vignette in which a married couple squabbles while searching for a missing shoe has a nice punch line – but they too often serve as shortcuts, ways to tie up the drama without delving too deeply into messy emotions.

The ice does get a little thin elsewhere in “Almost, Maine.” “Jeezum Crow” is a rather endearing regionalism – the first four or five times we hear it. And was it really necessary to create a love-lost-and-regained subplot for the mute duo that changes the scenery between scenes? But Mr. Barre has instilled among his four performers (led by the delightful Ms. Steeves) an off-kilter charm that matches the script perfectly. These men and women may not understand where their hearts are leading them most of the time, but their befuddled openness is awfully hard to resist.

Messrs. Cariani and Barre don’t completely shy away from the bruised egos and battered hearts that come with love and romance. Bumping unexpectedly into a woman you last saw several months earlier in your bed is awkward under any circumstances, but it’s worse when you see her at what turns out to be her bachelorette party. This is what happens to Jimmy (Mr. Hagan, who’s likable throughout) and Sandrine (Ms. Shor):

Sandrine: I thought you would have heard …
Jimmy: How would I have heard?
Sandrine: Well, you know … people talk.
Jimmy: Not about things they know you don’t wanna hear, they don’t.

Even this bittersweet encounter has a happy ending, though, courtesy of an ill-conceived tattoo and a sweet barmaid. It’s fanciful, it doesn’t make a lick of sense, it resolves itself with suspiciously tidy symmetry, and it works shockingly well. That’s Almost, Maine – and “Almost, Maine” – for you.

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