High above a lifelike kitchen belonging to Ernestine (Debra Messing) hang dozens of rocking horses, ukuleles, and basketball hoops. That strange and nostalgic planetary panoply, the most striking element of Christine Jones’s set design for Birthday Candles, promises a gorgeous weirdness that Noah Haidle’s quotidian play, which traces the trajectory of Ernestine’s life from the age of 18 to her death, never delivers.
Ernestine is convinced that she’s a rebel—that she’s destined to escape the house where her mother and grandmother before her baked the same cake to celebrate her every birthday, making the same speech that she does about how a cake’s ingredients represent all life in the universe. “I am going to surprise God!” Ernestine insists repeatedly.
Instead, Ernestine remains at home, marrying her high school prom date, Matt (John Earl Jelks), tolerating the ongoing jovial advances of her nerdy, devoted neighbor, Kenneth (Enrico Colantoni), and teaching too many traditions (including birthday speech-making, birthday nail-painting, and birthday height-measuring) to her children, Madeline and Billy (Susannah Flood and Christopher Livingston). Time passes quickly here, with the off-stage sound of a gong signaling another year—or 20—going by: We trace the progression of decades through the step-by-step improvement of Ernestine’s son’s piano skills and the endless procession of dead goldfish, all named Atman, a Sanskrit word that refers to an individual’s soul, who swim in circles until they perish in a metaphor-laden fishbowl on the dinner table.
Messing leads the cast with a subtle virtuosity. In the play’s final moments, the elderly Ernestine straightens her spine, re-embodying her younger self, and it’s astonishing to recognize how gradually and convincingly Messing has transformed her body and voice throughout Birthday Candles. Jelks’s depiction of an immobilized old man, spoon-fed and struggling to speak, and Livingston’s wide-eyed demonstration of the physical shifts of his character’s early-onset dementia, are similarly impressive.
But none of them can animate a script that leadenly represents life as a slog. Neither can Vivienne Benesch’s frequently charming staging. If the pleasant surprises that occur late in the game for Ernestine lend the play an ultimate air of sweetness, that’s largely because tragedy and trauma have been rushed off stage with the ring of another gong and another year gone. Haidle’s unprobing treatment of mental illness seems particularly lackluster. The characters, Ernestine especially, often speak in dense thickets of proverbs, a heightening of language that ultimately gets in the way of their relationships seeming real.
Birthday Candles most obviously recalls—or replicates—the uncovered grandeur of lives led on small scales that was most prominently excavated in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a more subversive and self-aware play written 84 years ago. I also saw a near-identical scene of a wife cajoling her husband to confess adultery by vowing not to become angry in the revival of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite last week—and that dated comedy is 53 years old. But Birthday Candles also pales in comparison with new, better plays with the same premise this season: Simon Stephens’s Morning Sun, for one, traced the full life of a woman (played by another TV star, Edie Falco) with a more potent sense of its protagonist’s power in telling her own story.
By never really delving into Ernestine’s perception of her narrow world, beyond her repeated cake-baking monologue about sugar and the cosmos, Haidle robs his characters of the opportunity to assert their own importance, even in their own miniature universes. Asking audiences to invest in the lightly crafted plotlessness of a life lived slowly is a challenge, but it’s not a new one. The history of plays that have succeeded at that task could comprise its own century-spanning drama. Of all the small-town windows to peer into for ninety minutes, Birthday Candles never illuminates the necessity of choosing this one.
The tonal shift or structural shock or sudden tension that might breathe some energy into Birthday Candles never arrives. “I’ve always waited for someone to take me into the other room and tell me when the real show was going to start,” Ernestine’s depressed daughter laments between gongs. It’s not hard to imagine how she feels.
Birthday Cake is now running at the American Airlines Theatre.
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