Birthday Candles
Birthday Candles, which premiered in 2018, was written by native Michigan playwright Noah Haidle, whom the Detroit Public Theater commissioned to write a play. Haidle produced this fantastic storyline of witnessing the life of Ernestine through a series of birthdays. The play opens with 17-year-old Ernestine Ashworth, a rebel against the universe., waging war with the every day, and a person that's going to surprise God. As she approached her 17th birthday, Ernestine began to feel insignificant. She is a young teen struggling to find her place in the world and wonders if her life would ever amount to anything. Despite her doubts, Ernestine remained determined to make something of herself. The play starts with her in the kitchen with her mother, who shows her how to prepare the right cake ingredients from a family recipe handed down from generations. It's a family tradition, and at each age, on Ernestine's birthday, they scroll her height and year against the wall and make a cake with eggs, butter, sugar, and salt, the humblest ingredients, with her mother telling her, but if you look deeper, you will find the story of the universe — filled with stardust and the apparatus of the cosmos. But Ernestine agonizes over her insignificance in the universe. Have I wasted my life? — this is the philosophical question Ernestine asks at the young age of seventeen. In the career of my soul, how many times have I turned from wonder? How many moments of grace have I left unnoticed? How much love have I left unsaid? Soon, it's her 18th birthday, her 41st, her 70th, and her 101st — and through a series of dings from a bell, we witness the generations of Ernestine's life pass before us with one cake baked over a century, painting the picture of the reality she feared the most.
Walking into the theater, I briefly talked with Artistic Director BJ Jones, who said, "I think you are going to like this one." He was right! Birthday Candles is this year's top performance production and a play that will change your life. Birthday Candles, which resonates with all humanity's triumphs and tragedies, will make you laugh and cry, and when it's over, your soul will be thankful you saw it. It's destined to become the new classic production. Noah Haidle came up with this incredible play after being with a friend whose eight-year-old daughter asked whether she had wasted her life. Haidle decided to make the character older, using a series of years to give her the answers to her life's meaning and the sacrifice of love and its unyielding sorrows and everlasting joy and pain. The original Broadway production of Birthday Candles suffered the same fate as other Broadway-bound plays that were to premiere when we experienced the worldwide pandemic known as COVID-19. However, it eventually opened at Roundabout's American Airlines Theatre, starring Debra Messing from "Will & Grace." Northlight Theatre production features the incredible Kate Fry performing as Ernestine ages throughout the play. I'm biased, as I've loved anything I've seen her in. Still, this poignant and humorous performance provides unforgettable, magical, and endearing moments that will touch your soul as you fight the tears of memories of loved ones. The brilliant illustration of Haidle's play is its simplicity, which allows you to see yourself or someone you know in any of the six characters on stage. Director Jessica Thebus masterfully brings Birthday Candle to life by enabling us to see and feel each character as if we were mirroring our own life story — and casting Kate Fry as Ernestine Ashworth was pure brilliance, as Fry is one of Chicago's best and is phenomenal as Ernestine. Fry is a skilled actor, and although Messing is known for the original role of Ernestine Ashworth, in my book, Fry is unmatched in any role she performs. This production provides a special treat, as another top performer, Timothy Edward Kane, Fry's husband, was cast as the nerdy Kenneth. Kane is another favorite, and I have enjoyed seeing these two giants in the theatrical world — and the chemistry of Fry and Kane is exhilarating.
Cyd Blakewell, Chike Johnson, Samuel B. Jackson, and Correbette Pasko, who play multiple roles, are dynamic, rounding out one of the best plays in Chicagoland. We see ourselves within the humor, pain, love, passion, isolation, loneliness, and what I call psychological therapy within this one-hour and forty-minute play. The painful feeling of being unwanted as Kenneth brings Ernestine a goldfish for her 17th birthday, only to be pushed away for decades, without Ernestine knowing that he loved her since birth. We see infidelity and the fleeing stages of life through Atman, the goldfish, who's blessed or cursed (you decide) with a short memory span of three seconds. By the conclusion of the play, 102 Atman's have come and gone, with Atman 103 there to remind us that life passes on. Then there is Joan, the nervous wife of Ernestine's son Billy, who brings nail polish so she can bond with her — and the parental demands Billy endures from his father, who continuously pressures him to become a man. But there is joy, too. Kenneth is the forever optimist who finally gets the girl —showing that persistent hope can bring us unforgettable love. The play quotes King Lear, who his daughters betrayed, tricked him into believing they loved him, seeking to overthrow him and his kingdom — who uttered this poetic phrase, "So we'll live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies. The writing of King Lear, Shakespeare, penned this remarkable quote as butterflies known as a symbol of human souls. Gilded is a thin plating of gold that strips away a butterfly's natural beauty and destroys its ability to fly. Ernestine, troubled by her insignificant life, finds comfort within the words and resonates with this quote. She wanted to fly away from the boredom of her Midwest town but felt like a gilded butterfly, stripped and unable to flee from the torments of mediocrity.
At the end of the play, a cake is finally made, and you can smell the aroma of a freshly baked cake in the air. You may ask the question, have I wasted my life? — in the career of my soul, how many times have I turned from wonder? How many moments of grace have I left unnoticed? How much love have I left unsaid? I wish you so many beautiful hours to find out.
4 Stars ****
Northlight Theatre
Birthday Candles
By Noah Haidle
Directed by Jessica Thebus
Featuring Kate Fry
SEPTEMBER 7 - OCTOBER 8, 2023
