Fast-Forwarding through Life

W e are repeatedly informed in Birthday Candles that the memory of a goldfish endures for only three seconds. It would have been witty for the play itself to have been called The Goldfish, because I doubt anyone who sees it is going to remember it by the time they get home.

Noah Haidle’s one-act piece (at New York City’s American Airlines Theatre through May 29), spans 84 years, is ostensibly about large themes, and, as directed by Vivienne Benesch, it takes place beneath a whimsical constellation of objects meant to suggest the cosmos and the place of ordinary people’s ordinary things in it. Yet this expansiveness of intent is undone by narrowness of execution. I was reminded of the hectic TikTok videos that teens love, in which one urgent monologue of 30 seconds or so is followed instantly by another and another, the jittery Starbucks-swilling viewers maniacally sweeping one thought to the side and launching the next every time boredom strikes. Some of Haidle’s scenes don’t last much longer than a TikTok.

Birthday Candles — which borrows the structure of Thornton Wilder’s 1931 piece A Long Christmas Dinner and imitates Wilder’s signature tone of fizzy, shallow philosophical posturing — provides an irresistible opportunity for a star turn by whoever plays Ernestine, whose habit it is to bake a birthday cake for herself in her kitchen every year and ages from 17 to 101 as the play gallops breathlessly across the years. Some birthdays (each new year is announced by an offstage chiming sound) are reduced to only a few seconds, and one scene contains no dialogue at all. When characters die, as many do, they dash or stroll dramatically offstage to the rear, but Ernestine remains on stage throughout. The television actress Debra Messing (best known for the NBC sitcom Will & Grace) does a fine job providing an emotional core to the play as Ernestine, evolving from melodramatic teen to betrayed wife to sorrowful mother to romantically fulfilled senior citizen to daffy old coot.

But the play is to drama what speed dating is to romance. Haidle could have developed three or four plays from the ideas he touches upon here. Instead, he doesn’t give due consideration to any of them. Birthday Candles could, for instance, have been a play about finding love late in life where you least expect it. Or it could have been about attempting to manage a family member’s mental illness. Or it could have been about the impermanence of memory. Or it could have been about the inevitably comical arc of how young people who announce sternly their intent to be rebels against the universe gradually succumb to the pull of the banal. Haidle doesn’t flesh out any of these notions and seems to think that mentioning an idea is the same as delving into it. This is drive-by drama, with the various implications flashing by like so many billboards along the way.

Ernestine’s prominence in the play is solar, with all other performers reduced to being mere satellites, which I suspect is why none of the supporting roles attracted top talent. John Earl Jelks, for instance, who plays her ultimately disappointing high-school-boyfriend-turned-husband, brings no weight whatsoever to his thinly written role, and he and Messing have no romantic chemistry whatsoever. They seem no more attached to one another than any two randomly chosen people. Moreover, unlike the sprightly Messing, who may be 53 but still radiates perkiness in her yellow dress, the 62-year-old Jelks has no ability to portray youth and simply should not have been cast here. Nor should Enrico Colantoni, a bald 59-year-old, have been chosen to play Kenneth, the smitten, trivia-spouting neighbor who as a teen informs us drolly of the meaning of the goldfish and hopelessly pursues Ernestine throughout her life. Putting these men in backwards baseball caps to suggest that they’re in their teens is not effective, and though Colantoni does generate a few laughs and wins over the audience a bit, he always seems a mismatch with Messing simply because he comes across as much older. A play that had genuinely charming actors playing these two love interests would have had a much greater chance of success. Supporting actors, who come and go in multiple roles as Ernestine’s children, grandchildren, etc., also don’t get much of a chance to shine in their sketched-out roles.

The play does achieve a bit of poignance at the end, but only because, at that point, the audience has seen Ernestine through so many reversals and grown so fond of Messing’s pluckiness in portraying them, that it feels like a loss to see the character at age 101, when she has parted with her house and some portion of her mind. It’s not that the play has anything much to say, but to the extent that Ernestine comes to stand for the certainty of mortality itself, her plight wrings a tear. It’s a pity that the play’s humanity is less palpable than its gimmicks.