Review by Anthony Chase
Set in a modest kitchen, “Birthday Candles” by Noah Haidle is a beautiful and affecting play. We follow Ernestine Ashworth at various stages of her life from age 17 to 101, always on her birthday. Throughout these snapshots, we see her experience love, loss, and the passage of time, and Haidle explores themes of mortality, the meaning of life, and how small, everyday moments can shape our existence.
The play owes its very existence to Chautauqua Theater Company, where it received essential development in the Chautauqua New Play Workshop of 2017. Under the direction of former CTC artistic director, Vivienne Benesch, it would have its world premiere at Detroit Public Theatre in 2018, and would go on to a high-profile Broadway outing, also directed by Benesch. That production starred Debra Messing of “Will and Grace” fame, who gave a tour de force performance. It has since been staged around the country. The current Chautauqua Theater Company production, directed by Arya Shahi, is a homecoming.
In this play, Haidle artfully engineers a series of simple, sometimes mundane, and often humorous repetitions between the generations to reveal the profundity of life. These are familiar in our own lives – the things our mothers said that we are startled to hear ourselves repeating; the things we said to our parents that we are shocked to hear from our own children.
In “Birthday Candles,” the most important of these repetitions is the ritualistic baking of a golden butter birthday cake.
In the opening scene, 17-year-old Ernestine boldly announces that she will never have children and that she is destined for a remarkable life. “I am a rebel against the universe. I will wage war with the everyday. I am going to surprise God!”
Her mother listens patiently and lovingly proceeds to teach her daughter how to bake a golden butter cake. We begin with the humblest of ingredients: flour, butter, and eggs, but Mother advises Ernestine that she is also working with “stardust, the machinery of the cosmos” and “atoms left over from creation.”
While these pronouncements are grandiose, they will ultimately turn out to be true, never, however, in the way that Ernestine imagines.
Unknown to the 17-year-old girl, or to the audience, Mom will be dead within weeks, the first of a litany of painful losses that Ernestine will be obliged to navigate during her long life. The baking of this cake takes on mythic importance.
New York was, I think, unduly harsh on “Birthday Candles,” or at least “The New York Times” was, claiming that the play “nearly suffocates in … grandiloquent pronouncements and existential metaphors.” By contrast, I adored the Broadway production and found these pronouncements to be deployed in light, playful, and clever ways. Haidle cunningly and eloquently evokes profundity from the humblest of ingredients – the mundane observation, the unnoticed gesture. I also admired the way Benesch, in her direction, unabashedly leaned into the play’s sense of the sentimental. Far from smothering his narrative, I would argue that Haidle breathes freshness and joy into the necessarily harrowing journey of life in 90 brisk and emotionally affecting minutes.
Shahi’s direction of the current Chautauqua Theater Company production preserves and highlights all the play’s virtues. He keeps his entire cast onstage throughout the proceedings, emphasizing its performative nature.
As Ernestine, Ms. Fernández must age from 17 to 101 with no change of costume or make-up. A skillful and charismatic actor, she deftly accomplishes this with wit and invention and is every bit as captivating as Ms. Messing had been in New York.
Alex Weisman is adorable as Ernestine’s nebbish-y neighbor boy, Kenneth, who pines for her and asks her, repeatedly, to go to the prom. He is repeatedly turned down. Through patient repetition, however, he will become the hero of the play. Weisman gives a charmingly humorous, yet palpably moving performance, handsomely delivering on all the fodder for both emotion and humor the playwright has handed him.
Everyone else must create multiple characters, often with very few words. Chautauqua has assembled an excellent cast to accomplish this.
One detects a background in improv from Amara Leonard who gives a brilliant and wide-ranging performance as Ernestine’s mother, and then as her tragically troubled daughter. She trusts Haidle’s words to create distinct and memorable women.
Martin K. Lewis, plays Matt, Ernestine’s high school crush who becomes her husband. This is a character who inspires humor exclusively at his own expense. Lewis manages to inspire empathy for this arguably unattractive character, and humor in his portrayal of Matt’s grandson.
A gifted comic, Kay Benson is delightful at every moment, most potently as Billy’s neurotic yet irresistible girlfriend, then wife, Joan. She takes a broadly comical character and makes her believable with a nuanced performance that exposes both Joan’s vulnerability and her undeniable kind-heartedness.
Kamal Sehrawy travels a far distance playing Ernestine’s son. Like Ernestine herself, we see him age and go through familiar life stages, often making frustratingly ill-advised choices. Always real, Sehrawy breathes power and sincerity into every moment. In the play’s final scene, he must portray a man awakened in the middle of the night by a now aged Ernestine, who is a total stranger to him. The play builds to this final birthday, during which Sehrawy’s character unwittingly and kindly evokes the plays most powerful revelations with humor and kindness. This is an impressive performance.
Among the play’s most blatant “existential metaphors,” is the character of a goldfish named Atman, the Sanskrit word for self or breath. As each of the people in Ernestine’s life dies, they exit the stage accompanied by the sound of an exhaled breath (sound design by Ben Truppin-Brown), and in the glow of red light (lighting by Anshuman Bhatia). It is very moving to observe the totality of a human life summarized in a single breath in a way that seems to evoke John Donne, who, as Margaret Edson reminds us in her play, “Wit,” separates life from death with a single comma: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
Each time this goldfish dies, Ernestine replaces him with another, also named Atman. Atman 2, Atman 3, and so forth. She will go through over 100 goldfish, each indistinguishable from the one before, each with a memory span of just three seconds. The whimsical nature of this symbol beautifully encompasses a play that never takes itself too seriously, and thereby reveals the profundity of our lives.
On the surface, Ernestine’s life is a series of disappointments, humiliations, and tragic losses. Nonetheless, through small repetitions, evoked one birthday cake at a time, we realize that her life has ultimately been beautiful, meaningful, and fulfilling, and that, very possibly, she has surprised God. And if I may wax sentimental myself, how wonderful it is to be reminded, in these contentious times, that life still beautiful and worthwhile.