Repetition could make magic occur: repeat a phrase or a phrase sufficient occasions and it breathes new life, contemporary that means. Or repetition can strip language till all that’s left are empty rhythms and sounds. Phrases are humorous like that.
Noah Haidle’s “Birthday Candles,” which opened on Broadway Sunday evening on the American Airways Theater, tries to construct poignancy and depth by means of moments that repeat like a file needle caught in a groove. As an alternative, this Roundabout Theater Firm manufacturing will get caught in a superficial cycle of wannabe profundities and emotional pantomimes.
“I’m a insurgent towards the universe. I’ll wage conflict with the on a regular basis. I’m going to shock God!” So declares the precocious 17-year-old Ernestine (Debra Messing) because the present opens. It’s her birthday, and her mom (Susannah Flood) is making golden butter cake; it’s a practice, one which Ernestine clings to for years, baking the identical cake for herself over 90 birthdays, which we reside by means of together with her in the midst of the 90-minute play.
With a fantastic offstage chime Ernestine immediately skips from one age to the following, although at an inconsistent clip — generally a 12 months, generally a decade, however we’re at all times on her birthday, and she or he’s at all times baking her cake. (Messing beats the eggs, lotions the butter and mixes the batter in actual time, making this sugar-addicted critic marvel: The place are our slices?)
As she bakes, the main points of her life fill in round her: Relations and pals enter and exit, are born and die. With a chime her highschool crush, Matt (John Earl Jelks), turns into her husband. One other and so they have a teenage son, Billy (Christopher Livingston), and a daughter in school, Madeline (Flood, heartachingly tragic), and earlier than Ernestine is aware of it Billy is able to suggest to his hopelessly neurotic girlfriend, Joan (a pleasant Crystal Finn).
All of the whereas Ernestine’s lovesick good friend Kenneth (Enrico Colantoni, lovable at any age) casually strolls in unannounced, carrying a torch for her for many years.
With atypical characters expounding on the preciousness of life, “Birthday Candles” aspires to convey eloquent whimsy — births, deaths, love, despair, complete constellations of human emotions and ideas — nevertheless it’s Christine Jones’ wondrous set design that wordlessly manages the trick.
A homey powder-blue kitchen is framed by three door-less thresholds on the left, proper and middle — every one representing passage into the home or the surface world, or a extra metaphysical passage into the afterlife. Dwarfing the kitchen is an evening sky messy with floating objects — keyboard, tricycle, dollhouse, umbrella, soccer ball, a teddy bear together with his proper arm prolonged, left paw positioned over his face as if in embarrassment or concern.
It’s there that we neatly see how the private can meet the common. Down under, although, we’re dutifully following an unrelenting parade of progeny embodied, “Lehman Trilogy”-style, by Flood, Finn, Jelks and Livingston. At some factors it turns into a trouble to see the view from Ernestine’s household tree, given how rapidly figures in her life disappear, and the way youngsters remodel into grandchildren, then great-grandchildren.
These shifts are robust work for the actors, who should typically convey their characters’ diversified ages in succinct strains: a lifetime in just some minutes. Many of the forged, significantly Messing, who delivers a clumsy caricature of a teen after which the exaggerated hand-wringing and dithering warble of an outdated lady, wrestle within the dawn and sundown years.
Vivienne Benesch’s path exaggerates the methodical sentimentality of Haidle’s script, permitting broad, clichéd gestures to do shorthand work. The teenagers, slouching from one finish of the stage to the following, are unbearably self-righteous. (“You’re a shadow in a swimsuit posing as a human, you have to be ashamed of your self,” sneer the teenage avatars of two generations, in one of many play’s funnier repetitions.) And the middle-aged adults wilt into the weary postures of seniors, with their sighs and illnesses, proper earlier than our eyes.
As Ernestine shuffles nearer to a century of birthdays, the metamorphoses lean into emotional manipulation. We watch one character all of a sudden going slack, his face twisting and his palms stiffening in place, as if struggling a stroke. It’s unsettling, however for anybody who has seen household affected by sickness, such transitions really feel gauche; a fast change in posture and a handful of strains meant to characterize the monumental losses we reckon with in, as Ernestine calls it, “the day by day human errand.”
“Birthday Candles” almost suffocates in such grandiloquent pronouncements and existential metaphors. Substances for the birthday cake embody not simply the standard pantry staples however “stardust, the equipment of the cosmos” and “atoms left over from creation.” Characters recite strains from “King Lear” in order to share the mad monarch’s rantings concerning the nature of life and the passage of time.
Even a poor goldfish, a nonunion actor in a spherical bowl on the kitchen desk, works his tail off as a stand-in for what Kenneth calls “the divinity inside your self.”
In some methods this attain for the cosmic comes with the territory. In surreal performs like his 2016 “Smokefall,” Haidle aspires to combine multigenerational household drama and poetic musings. And he acknowledges that this work, his Broadway debut, is impressed by Thornton Wilder’s “The Lengthy Christmas Dinner,” which, like his basic “Our City,” employs chronological jumps as a method of contemplating love, life and dying within the tales of on a regular basis folks.
At its most strained, “Birthday Candles” looks like an imitation of a superior work. The time-hopping conceit doesn’t enable us to get an actual sense of the world past Ernestine’s kitchen. That stated, there have been loads of empathetic sniffles and sighs within the viewers throughout the efficiency. Essentially the most transferring moments to me had been these quiet exchanges that functioned as silhouettes for unstated griefs. After one devastating loss, Ernestine and Matt bake a cake collectively in a weighty silence; after a number of seconds he walks away, head hanging like a half-mast flag on a windless day.
Ernestine’s story predictably finishes by circling again to the start — cake, stardust and atoms. Enable me to finish with my very own dose of rigorously administered déjà vu: repetition could make magic occur. However actual magic comes from the forward-march of a life whose on a regular basis rhythms might repeat, positive, however nonetheless go away room for accident and likelihood — essentially the most sensational improvisation.
Birthday Candles
By means of Might 29 at American Airways Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org; Working time: 1 hour half-hour.
