What is the story and substance of an individual life? Noah Haidle’s Broadway play Birthday Candles (American Airlines Theatre, to May 29), sets out to interrogate this Very Big Question through the life of Ernestine (Debra Messing) and the people, ties, and events that bind around her. Christine Jones’ set not only includes the kitchen of Ernestine’s Grand Rapids, Michigan, home, but a constellation of planets above it, with a stunningly hung universe of floating domestic objects, like a basketball hoop, rolling pin, and cushions.
But for all the scattering passage of time—just over 90 years of Ernestine’s life is represented in this 90-minute Roundabout Theatre Company play—it also stands still, because every moment from her life we see unfolds on her birthday, from her 17th to her death 90 years later aged 107, and the baking of a golden butter birthday cake on that day. The process of baking the cake is the start-to-will-it-ever-finish? task of this comedy-drama, playing alongside the aging of Ernestine’s life. The passage of time from one distinct era to the next, scene to scene, is marked by the dinging of a cooking bell: How is a cake baked, and how is a life baked?
Much as the play, directed by Vivienne Benesch, deploys big themes of love, marriage, mortality, betrayal, and tragedy, there is also a stilted stasis to what unfolds. The grand sweep feels narrow. Prosaically, you wish somebody would finish the mixing already as the years continue. Will the damn cake ever get placed in the oven? But the cake leadenly Stands for Something—what is ever truly completed in a life? What goes into it? What does it stand for?—and so you wait, and bakers may very well worry about the barely mentioned icing. Won’t this take more time?
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The first scene sets the template for all the following scenes. “Have I wasted my life?” Ernestine demands of her mother, Alice (Susannah Flood), numbering the “250 babies born every minute, 15,000 every hour,” with the dramatic over-exaggeration of every sensitive teen. How, she wonders, can she reconcile her individual existence against the weight of those numbers? Alice just wants her help baking the cake, but Ernestine will not be silenced. “I won’t be having a family. I am a rebel against the universe. I will wage war with the everyday. I am going to surprise God.”
It sounds funny and not so funny, because in some ways Ernestine will go on to make ostensibly conventional choices, while also waging war with the everyday and surprising God in her own ways.
Her mother smiles patiently, listing the “humblest of ingredients” for the cake: eggs, butter, sugar, salt. And, as she scatters from above, she includes, with a wide smile, “atoms left over from creation.”
“Stardust,” Ernestine adds ecstatically, the mother-daughter story routine well established.
The play sets out to marry the mundane and the magical—the kitchen and the whole damn universe—as Ernestine’s life continues, as elements of that first scene reoccur, and other elements diverge. The dramatic structure is intriguing—how much repetition can you stand? I hope a lot—but it also constrains and confuses. At 17, neighbor Kenneth’s (Enrico Colantoni) pursuit of Ernestine seems creepy. A repeated joke in the play is that he steals quietly up to her every birthday and surprises her, until they both, as the years advance, play their own game with the game. Kenneth always seems a little odd and obsessed, and yet we are led to believe that he is the true love of Ernestine’s life.
That seems odd, because Matt (John Earl Jelks) is Ernestine’s longtime husband, and their intimacy on stage seems the most resonant. The marriage ends, and this review won’t spoil how and why, but one of the hobbling aspects of the play’s structure is that we don’t see the lead-up to its implosion, or what unfolds afterward. There are other tragic deaths that occur, illnesses, turning points—and the challenge for the actors is to somehow convey their emotional gravity with no before and after mooring them. We feel somewhat trapped in both kitchen and the play’s time tropes.
Messing, who won an Emmy for her portrayal of Grace in Will and Grace and has been nominated for many other awards, retains both her mastery of wry zinger timing, as well as the physical comedy—gentler here—that her famous TV role showcased. She and her fellow actors try to negotiate the play’s tricky pacing—to convey the depth of family life and relationships in moments of hastened brushstrokes—but it is hard to care and invest in the scale of an event’s import if we haven’t spent the dramatic time with the characters to feel their intimacy.
At moments like this, you want to spend more time within the passage of time with Ernestine and her loved ones. Too often you sit and think, “Oh, she’s run away, or she’s dead now?” “Oh, he’s ill? What’s wrong with him?” We must assume emotions like grief are being experienced, but we do not see them in real time. An event happens, and it simply joins the palimpsest of Ernestine’s life, marked by the dings of the bell; the viewer chalks the events up as if totting up a restaurant bill.
Messing stays as Ernestine throughout the play, as does Colantoni as Kenneth. Around them Jelks, Flood, Crystal Finn, and Christopher Livingston, play—as the years pass—an array of children, partners, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and, in the play’s loveliest scene, its final one—total strangers. Finn stands out for her energy and sense of comedy, and we smile as Livingston as a boy castigates his father for being a convention-hugging “shadow” of a human, and then having his own child say the same to him many years later. He apologizes to his mother “retroactively” for being a jerk.
While the other actors stick with their accents as they age, Messing chooses another route, aging her voice into a kind of clotted, dotty Margaret Rutherford meets Katharine Hepburn drawl. Instead of acting, as intended, as a necessary marker of aging, it adds an element of obstructive pantomime. Her determinedly executed stoop comes with a chiropractor’s advice and aid, one hopes. One wonders how—and even if—the indomitable Ernestine will eventually depart our mortal coil.
The stolen moments of the play—Messing letting Ernestine silently imbibe the world and events around her—make the most impact, as well as its affecting denouement (in which Finn, again, is a standout), when Ernestine attempts to finally finish the cake (and my, how you will panic over her lifting a container of flour). As it confronts the big and small questions of existence and time itself, Birthday Candles itself proves simultaneously over-baked and under-baked, but its performers ensure it is served warm.
