Noah Haidle’s new play Birthday Candles (Roundabout Theater Company at the American Airlines) feels like its been on the bakery shelf a bit too long. Starring Debra Messing of “Will and Grace” fame as an everywoman housewife-mother-dessert entrepreneur named Ernestine, this Thornton Wilder-lite diversion crams 90 years of living into 95 minutes with very little insight or depth.
Beginning at age 17, Ernestine starts a tradition of baking her birthday cake while reciting fortune-cookie aphorisms about the universe, atoms, and creation having something to do with eggs, butter, and flour. Her entire life transpires in Christine Jones’s beautifully detailed kitchen set which opens up into a view of the heavens festooned with everyday objects. It makes for a pretty greeting-card picture, but a shallow play.
A bell sounds every time a year passes as Ernestine experiences marriage, motherhood, divorce, self-discovery, second love, and finally senility and death with each succeeding generation of children and grandchildren reciting the same claptrap about finding one’s place in the cosmos and that a party is a place for rest and to notice things. (Huh?) There are also references to Shakespeare’s King Lear (Ernestine acts in a high-school feminist version as Queen Lear), the memory span of goldfish (three seconds), and the Hindu philosophy of Atman, all repeated ad nauseam.
There are moments of light humor and cozy warmth in Vivienne Benesch’s Hallmark Network staging, and the game cast offers flashes of subtext here and there. Messing deserves commendation for remaining onstage throughout and aging appropriately. She does a professional job, but it’s not particularly moving or special.
I was taken with Crystal Finn’s refreshingly neurotic Joan, Ernestine’s insecure daughter-in-law. Enrico Colantoni is an endearing nebbish as Kenneth, Ernestine’s neighbor who has been hopelessly in love with her since childhood. John Earl Jelks, Susannah Flood, and understudy Brandon J. Pierce (subbing for Christopher Livingston) ably complete the cast for a low-cal Birthday cake. Blow out your candles, Ernestine and goodbye.
