‘Birthday Candles’: Life’s Ingredients May Not All Be Delicious, but There’s Icing on Top

Is it better to be a human being or a goldfish?That’s the rhetorical question posed by playwright Noah Haidle in “Birthday Candles.” The fish certainly has it easier, considering the central human character — played in Roundabout Theatre Company’s New York premiere by Debra Messing — ages 90 years in as many minutes, as an advertisement boasts. Under Vivienne Benesch’s sensitive, witty direction, this is achieved without the application of makeup or prosthetics, which no doubt would require a doubling of the running time. Mr. Haidle’s heroine, Ernestine, isn’t even granted a costume change; she wears a simple yellow dress, suitable for an ingénue or a great-grandmother.Ms. Messing, who rose to fame more than two decades ago as a star of the TV series “Will & Grace,” relies on the skills that actors begin developing from the moment they play older characters in school productions. We meet Ernestine as a free spirit of 17, a young woman who declares herself “a rebel against the universe” who will “wage war with the everyday” and “surprise God.” Ms. Messing, who is in her early 50s, seems to shed decades in capturing her character’s girlish playfulness and naïve determination. As promised, Ernestine is in her inevitable physical decline roughly an hour later, and Ms. Messing makes this equally credible and affecting — not only by adopting duskier speech and increasingly labored movements, but by showing us the emotional toll of a life rife with tragedy and disappointment.No such challenges face the gilled creature who represents the more than 100 goldfish that accompany Ernestine in her kitchen through the years. As every child knows, their kind doesn’t stick around for long; besides, as we’re repeatedly assured here, they don’t remember anything for more than three seconds. Of course, the unspoken point of “Birthday Candles” is that unless we homo sapiens are extremely unfortunate, our heartache can be mitigated by profound joy. If Ernestine’s path to finding her bliss seems contrived at points, Mr. Haidle — who has said he was inspired by Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner,” another one-act play tracing a family over nine decades — mines the poignance and solace in his premise, while also realizing its comedic possibilities.As the title suggests, we get to know Ernestine over a series of her birthdays, as she and relatives played by actors juggling two or three roles convene to follow her mother’s treasured cake recipe. Christine Jones’s set design establishes a tone that is at once warmly fanciful and eerie, with objects ranging from a tricycle to a rocking chair hanging over a homey assortment of wood and pastels. A ringing of chimes indicates the passage of time, with several years represented in comically rapid succession at a couple of points.Characters repeat their own words and those of others, indicating how rituals and perspectives are passed from generation to generation, while also constantly evolving. “Have I wasted my life?” Ernestine’s son, Billy (Christopher Livingston), asks his mother when he is 17; it’s the same question she posed to her own mother at that age. “You’re a shadow in a suit posing as a human,” he then tells his father, Matt — an insult that will be hurled back at Billy one day.We will meet Billy’s girlfriend and later wife, Joan — whose awkwardness is made hilarious by a brilliant Crystal Finn — as well as their daughter and grandchildren as the main characters continue to age. One of Shakespeare’s most tragic characters also figures into “Birthday Candles.” In the bloom of youth, Ernestine plays Lear as a queen in her school’s “feminist interpretation” of the play. The fallen ruler’s final words to virtuous daughter Cordelia while she is alive — an invitation, prosaically put, to live and pray and laugh and sing — then follow Ernestine through life. It’s surely not spoiling anything to say that Mr. Haidle’s protagonist follows this advice more pragmatically and, for all her trials, manages a better outcome.

‘Birthday Candles’: Life’s Ingredients May Not All Be Delicious, but There’s Icing on Top

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