An austere-looking man in a black suit and red tie walks into the center of the checkered marble floor and looks around nervously. He fiddles with each of two bright flower arrangements before turning to the audience and passionately declaring, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” He repeats the phrase about nine times as the crowd wonders who, specifically, he’s talking to.

The man in the spotlight is Mark Cohen, one of a trio of actors starring in playwright Jeffrey Hatcher’s “Three Viewings.” Directed by Kent Stephens, the three-part play will run through Sunday, Nov. 2, at the St. Aspinquid Masonic Lodge in York, Maine.

“Three Viewings” is the second full production of Harbor Light Stage’s Main Stage series, following “The Pavilion,” which ran at a historic barn in Kittery Point, Maine, last spring. This time, Stephens has transformed a ceremonial room in a Masonic lodge into a funeral parlor set in a small Midwestern town. Following Cohen’s solo performance come monologues from actresses Kristan Raymond Robinson and Norma Fire.

Cohen plays love-smitten funeral director Emil, who is hopelessly enamored with a real estate agent named Tessie. He cherishes their chance encounters at funerals and makes a comically romantic game of proclaiming his love for her when she’s not looking or listening, titillated by the thought of her one day turning and catching him. But she never does, and it drives the dapper director to the brink of insanity.

The only props on Cohen’s “stage” are a plush golden sofa and a pair of floral arrangements toward the rear of the room’s Grecian marble floor. The audience watches from antique, hand-carved oak benches that line three walls, leaving all eyes on the solitary actor before them.

Boston-based Cohen, who teaches at Brown University and is founder and artistic director of the TheatreBridge Company, handles the pressure ably, shifting easily between emotions of light-hearted humor and heartbroken grief. The desperateness of his situation unfolds humorously as he ponders ways to get Tessie’s attention, even considering subtle codes in the funeral parlor’s corpses—“cryptography in the swirls of a dead person’s hair,” as he puts it.

Even more compelling is the performance that follows by Robinson, who plays a veteran corpse-robbing jewelry thief named Mac. When her rich grandmother, Nettie James, dies at the age of 103, Mac gives herself a special assignment to recover a tear-shaped ring that she has coveted since her childhood.

After pinching a pair of ruby earrings off a recently deceased woman to fund her flight, Mac heads to her grandmother’s funeral and begins “casing the joint.” She expects the heist to be easy. “I’ve been stealing jewelry off of corpses for years, grandma will be a fucking cinch,” she conceitedly declares. But she encounters some unexpected snafus that ultimately force her to reexamine her life and explore the guilt-laden path that led her to a life of corpse thievery.

Robinson, a staple of the local theater scene, creates a character who seems frosty cold in her black dress and red lipstick, which makes it all the more captivating when her icy exterior cracks and her hidden insecurity and vulnerability spill out. Like Cohen, she is able to convince the audience that she is waltzing through a roomful of mourning family members when, in fact, she is alone onstage. 

The same can be said of Fire, although her turn as the recently widowed Virginia is a bit more sedentary. Virginia remains seated on the sofa, an unlit cigarette and lighter in hand, as she recounts a sad tale of the difficulties that befell her after her husband’s funeral.

Virginia’s husband, Ed Carpolotti, was a prominent contractor in town and a seemingly well-respected man. But after his death, a series of debtors emerge, all asking Virginia to pick up the tab on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unreplenished loans. The situation gets even worse when a mysterious letter arrives, threatening to expose a list of dark secrets about Ed in a million-dollar blackmail.

Fire, a prolific actor who regularly appears as Judge Jensen on “Law & Order,” is at turns sassy and frightened as Virginia, and her emotional unraveling is stirring to watch. Her segment offers a fitting close to the three-in-one play, with several unseen characters recurring through each section. 

Stephens, the founding artistic director of Harbor Light Stage and the director of more than 150 theater productions, has taken advantage of a unique space for his latest endeavor, competently tackling the challenge of staging a play with only one actor at a time addressing the audience. The play relies entirely on the believability of its actors and the subtle sound and lighting cues provided by stage manager Zhana Morris.

Next on the agenda for the Main Stage series is “The Creek Man,” an original work about local accordion player and river swimmer Gary Sredzienski, which will be staged next spring. Harbor Light’s Bold Face play reading series continues on Monday, Nov. 10, with a reading of Lisa Kron’s “Well” at the Kittery Art Association gallery.

“Three Viewings” will run at 101 Long Sands Road in York through Nov. 2 on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at 7:30 p.m., plus a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $30. Call 207-439-5769 or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it