When people die, they walk into the void behind Christine Jones’s kitchen set. There’s something icky about seeing the boy Ernestine turned down for prom pursuing her for decades, but Colantoni steps deftly and delicately through the writing’s minefield. There’s just one fixed point in her life: next-door neighbor Kenneth (Enrico Colantoni), who has loved her for years from not-afar. Her son, Billy (Christopher Livingston), marries Joan (Crystal Finn), so grandchildren resupply the kitchen table, but they too stop coming by for the party. First, her mother Alice (Susannah Flood), who taught her to bake then her daughter, Madeline (also played by Flood), who loses her mind later her husband, Matt (John Earl Jelks), to infidelity and then illness. She has a circumscribed life (no mention of friends or education or interests or…), but what she has, she loses. Ernestine suffers a lot as she grows older. That isn’t to say that it can’t be occasionally moving. This focus allows the Roundabout Theater to mount the show as a star vehicle for Messing - but it also constrains and dulls the experience. Instead it keeps its attention firmly on Ernestine. For all its references to philosophy, though, Birthday Candles doesn’t achieve that existential calm, nor does it contain those other plays’ sense of a network of human connection. Long-horizon plots tend to be a little melancholy, but the timeline prevents them from being sentimental about mortality. Those other dramas handle people’s fates lightly. I think if you’d never seen a play before in your life you’d still think this rings a bell. But there’s a sense of hours lost here, rather than a life counted up.Ĭandles will make you think of other, stronger plays: It is certainly an overt homage to Thornton Wilder, whose The Long Christmas Dinner sped through one family’s 90 Christmases, but it also recalls time-compressed dramas like Dan LeFranc’s The Big Meal, or Will Arbery’s Plano, or Will Eno’s The Underlying Chris. Each time, we find her baking her cake in her kitchen such domestic repetitions are her ticking clock. We meet Ernestine (Debra Messing) on her 17th birthday, and then we meet her again on that date on succeeding birthdays, visiting her 18th celebration, then some year in her ‘30s, then her 50th, and eventually her 107th. It takes him about 90 minutes to travel 90 years. In the new Broadway drama Birthday Candles, the playwright Noah Haidle hopscotches rapidly through time. Enrico Colantoni and Debra Messing in Birthday Candles.
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