We 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.
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