People’s Light presents Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles

In chronicling the extraordinary ordinary life of one woman across 10 decades, playwright Noah Haidle’s endearing comedy sensitively balances the sentimental and the profound. Birthday Candles joins a theatrical lineage that includes Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Annie Baker’s The Flick that locate deep meaning in the quotidian American experience, leaving viewers gasping with familiarity and holding back tears. And People’s Light does this beautiful script justice here.

Ernestine's birthday

We first meet Ernestine Ashworth (Teri Lamm) on the morning of her 17th birthday, learning to make the signature golden butter recipe from her mother, Alice (Claire Inie-Richards). Crafting the confection is a ritual she’ll repeat faithfully for the next 90 years. Along the way, Ernestine marries, divorces, remarries, enters widowhood, marries again (this time to the love of her life), births and buries children, and becomes a successful businesswoman. All this occurs while stirring eggs into flour.

At 17, Ernestine announces her iconoclastic urge to “wage war with the everyday.” As she ages, she occasionally despairs that her existence—mostly taking place in the Michigan home where she was born and raised, rendered with beautiful straightforwardness by Daniel Zimmerman—looks so much like that of other people. But Haidle needs barely scratch the surface to reveal the layers that complicate and color Ernestine. If John Lennon once sang that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans, she has lived it.

For a play that is often deeply funny, Haidle doesn’t shy away from presenting the troubled waters of grief with piercing clarity. (It’s a recurring theme in his works—especially the underrated Saturn Returns, which Theatre Exile produced locally in 2011.) The dramatization of Ernestine’s relationship with her daughter Madeline (also Inie-Richards), whose self-functioning increasingly deteriorates due to mental illness, is especially wrenching. Yet Haidle takes care to present Madeline as a fully fledged person rather than a stereotype: he shows the levity and warmth that exist beneath the troubled exterior.

A fully human slice of life

The People’s Light production, directed by former longtime artistic director Abigail Adams, fires on all cylinders. The small cast of company veterans includes Ian Merrill Peakes, Julianna Zinkel, Kevin Bergen, and Jacob Orr, the majority excelling in multiple roles. In addition to Lamm, the charming Bergen is the only cast member who sticks to one part: the perpetually lovesick Kenneth, who carries a torch for Ernestine across nearly ten decades.

Adams makes the wise choice to keep all the actors onstage, seated along the side walls, for the duration of the performance. It gives the impression that the important people in Ernestine’s life are ever present to her, even if they’ve permanently departed. Lighting designer Dennis Parichy skillfully suggests the passage of time, and the transitions from this world to the next.

But no production would succeed without a strong central performance as Ernestine, and in this respect, Lamm fully delivers. As Ernestine travels across her long life, Lamm subtly conveys what she learns and what she loses, with no need for hoary affectations or exaggerated prosthetic effects to make herself seem older. Dressed in a single costume by Marla J. Jurglanis, she uses her voice and physicality to seem older, wiser, and more open as time soldiers on. She finds profound meaning in every stage of Ernestine’s life.

Throughout the play, Ernestine receives numerous gifts to celebrate each new year—the most memorable being a goldfish, who ends up being replaced more than a hundred times. There is no greater gift on view, however, than Haidle’s thoughtful portrayal of what it means to be fully human. This slice of life contains the sweet and the bitter, perfectly balanced.