Birthday Candles

 
Birthday Candles
Roundabout Theatre Company
American Airlines Theater
March 29, 2022 

Photo courtesy of Roundabout Theatre Company

How do you measure a life?  Through its celebrations?  Its loses?  Its accomplishments?  Its hardships?  Noah Haidle ponders that question in his play Birthday Candles.  The action takes place on the many birthdays of his main character, spanning almost one hundred years.  Director Vivienne Benesch finds the pearls in each of Mr. Haidle’s tender moments, and this stellar cast string them together to deliver a stunning theatrical experience.

It is Ernestine’s (played by Debra Messing) seventeenth birthday.  Her mother, Alice (played by Susannah Flood), teaches her how to bake her special birthday cake so part of her will live on in tradition.  Ernestine is distracted by her dreams of finding her place in the cosmos and auditioning for the role of King (Queen) Lear in her high school play, but she does learn how to bake the cake.  The action flows seamlessly into her eighteenth birthday.  Her neighbor, Kenneth (played by Enrico Colantoni), surprises her by coming to her party two hours early.  Ernestine is baking the cake as her mother taught her.  Kenneth asks Ernestine to the prom.  She turns him down and tells him to go home and return in two hours.  When Matt (played by John Earl Jelks) shows up early, Ernestine does not send him home, and she does accept his request to take her to the prom.  In an instant, it is eighteen years later.  Ernestine and Matt’s two teenage children (played by Christopher Livingston and Susannah Flood) are celebrating Ernestine’s birthday.  Ernestine is preparing the cake her mother taught her how to bake.  The story continues to flash forward, celebrating the joys, disappointments, and turning points of the coming years on each birthday in Ernestine’s long and abundant life.

Debra Messing, Christopher Livingston, & Susannah Flood
Photo courtesy of Roundabout Theatre Company

The cast plays numerous roles throughout the story as Ernestine’s children grow up and have children of their own.  Each distinct character weaves a pattern of love and connection.  Each birthday repeats tradition, sayings, gestures, and sentiment as the characters face the challenges and truths of the present year.  Debra Messing grows and blossoms as Ernestine.  She captures your heart the minute she enters and does not let go throughout the action of the play.  Her physicality shifts as her character ages and her heart expands.  She creates genuine and endearing relationships with each character in the story.  Susannah Flood, Enrico Colantoni, John Earl Jelks, Chrystal Finn, and Christopher Livingston all deliver authentic, heart warning performances.

Birthday Candles is a much needed reminder of what is important on this journey we call life.  It is playing at Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre through May 29.  Go see it! 

Domenick Danza