Review: BIRTHDAY CANDLES Crystallizes Moments at City Theatre

The first thing I noticed in the theatre at City Theatre's Birthday Candles was the set. I'm a longtime lover of thrift shops, junk shops and the maximalist "detail everywhere" aesthetic of the Disney Imagineers. My companion for the night and I spent the preshow prying the set apart with our eyes (does that E mean anything? is that a flute or a clarinet in the box up there? hey, what's that in the corner there that I can't quite make out?), unaware that nearly every item in that montage would soon have a deeper meaning. Kudos to set designer Sasha Jin Schwartz, who worked with director Mark Masterson to craft a set that seems inconsequential and full of trivia at first, but later proves to great significance. You know, like a life?

In Noah Haidle's dreamlike dramedy, Ernestine Ashworth (Robin Walsh) ages from seventeen to somewhere over a century. This occurs over the course of ninety minutes in a series of vignettes related to her birthday, all of which occur in the kitchen of the house she has grown up in and later lives in as an adult. Most of these involve the baking of a simple homemade cake, a ritual passed down to Ernestine by her mother which she then passes on to her own offspring. Throughout this chronological journey, a cast of five players fill out the roles of peers, lovers, offspring and strangers, their role shifting around the ever-present Ernestine.

Robin Walsh's performance as Ernestine is central to the entire piece; it's not a one-woman show, but it almost feels like one. Driving home after the show, I couldn't stop thinking about her performance in contrast to the other five. Seemingly by design, her Ernestine never "changes" over the course of the piece. I don't mean to say that her acting is stagnant or that her character has no arc, but that, unlike the ensemble cast, Walsh makes no significant alteration to her body language, her voice or even her characterization to suggest youth/vitality or old age/infirmity. What we get, instead, is the echt-Ernestine. The essential self; a consciousness rather than a changeable physical being. When you think of yourself in the past, you can remember how you felt, but you don't feel like them; you don't regress in your memory to BE who you were then. This, to me, felt like part of the piece's genius: we see and feel through the lens of what Ernestine remembers seeing and feeling, not what she actually saw and felt. Walsh brings a warmth and wisdom to the role, drawing on her older era without entirely losing the dramatic and impulsive traits of the younger days. How do these contradictory traits fit together in one person simultaneously over a century? It's complicated, but so are people.

Surrounding Walsh are five fine actors whose characters do, indeed, grow and change. If at times some of these roles feel two-dimensional compared to Ernestine's three, that seems intentional; the cartoonishness of the smallest walk-on roles makes Ernestine's timeless realness pop more by contrast. Deena Aziz sets the evening's tone early on as Ernestine's poet-philosopher mother, who sees the meaning of life and the mechanics of the universe in the simple act of baking a cake. Aziz later subverts this warmth, playing Ernestine's eventual daughter with an awkward, antisocial coldness that contrasts with mother and grandmother alike. José Pérez IV tackles the challenging role of Ernestine's son Billy, who inherits both Ernestine's and her husband's most challenging traits. It's a role wrought with bone-dry humor and intensity, which Pérez handles with aplomb. (His role in the second half as a friendly neighbor is comparatively lighter, but provides the constant belly laughs and good vibes Billy lacks.) In between these two is Pittsburgh legend-in-the-making Saige Smith, who constantly proves able to play anyone and appear in everything. Smith shines in her largest role as Billy's neurodivergent-coded girlfriend, then later charms as Ernestine's surprisingly uncomplicated granddaughter. 

And then there are The Men: namely, Gavin Lawrence as Kenneth and Andrew William Smith, as Matt. At first, they present as classic sitcom-style stereotypes (the needy, nerdy friend and the all-American boy next door respectively), but as the two people who remain in Ernestine's narrative the longest, they each develop depths and layers and nuances to contrast with Ernestine's intentionally stable presentation. Lawrence's gradual transition from Urkel-adjacent comic relief to sweet and quirky old-timer is satisfying and heartwarming, while Smith's sudden shift from relative vitality to old age hits like a knee to the stomach. Some people age like fine wine, and others can fall apart overnight, a fact of life that Haidle's play points up in a way that is never didactic.

Let's shift away from the production to the show itself, for a moment, since there is no production without a script. One thing my mind kept repeating in my head through the entire performance was The Fantasticks. There's no intentionally twee content in Birthday Candles like in the Jones and Schmidt musical, no shifts from prose to verse. But Haidle's prose DOES shift from rapid-fire realism and grounded comedy into the modern 21st century prose-poetry vernacular. The language will be totally standard American speech, then suddenly diverge, momentarily, into a dreamy and poetic reverie, or an almost inexplicable turn of phrase midsentence pulls us from the kitchen table into the stratosphere before returning to the ground again. It's a very tricky style, both to write and to perform (think about how many people have imitated the prose-poetry of Welcome to Night Vale and failed to make any impact whatsoever). I'd even go so far as to say that navigating the shift between realist and poetic language in a 21st century play is harder than navigating the same in Shakespeare, because here there is no methodology, no praxis, no groundwork for how it works. You just have to GET IT, and this cast gets it.

Maybe it's the South American in me, but I naturally default to seeing certain things through the lens of magic realism. To me, musicals like The Fantasticks and plays like The Glass Menagerie are in conversation with One Hundred Years of Solitude and A VERY OLD Man with Enormous Wings. These are stories in which the rules of Reality as we accept them are not broken but bent, and we accept these conventional bendings not as science fiction or fantasy, but simply as "it do be like that sometimes." Sure, you can argue that these are just the conceits of what Williams called "memory plays," but sometimes it's something more, as in Noah Haidle's Birthday Candles. Here, almost a century of isolated moments play out in montage... but also take place in real time, as a single unbroken loop. The baking of dozens of cakes, crystallized into the baking of one cake by an aging, ageless woman who has never aged a day in her life. Paradoxical? Maybe. High concept? A little. Vague or pretentious? Not one bit. It's a narrative conceit, but it's also... not? Don't overthink it. Take the journey. Bake the cake.