I will wage war with the everyday.” Spoiler alert: she doesn’t. Photo by Joan Marcus.Įmmy Award winner Debra Messing ( Will & Grace) stars as Ernestine, who declares at the start, “I am a rebel against the universe. And several of those improbable poetic passages are stuck in a pattern of unnecessary redundancy, repeated from generation to generation to establish the cyclical connections within a family that never truly explores their meaning, for nine irregularly paced decades, in 90 minutes that, instead of flying by, felt like an eternity to me, with scenes that never hit their intended heights of comedy or depths of profundity. Consequently, what may be intended as funny, thought-provoking, poignant, or defining instead sounds simply unbelievably uncharacteristic and results in unnatural (and frequently stumbling) deliveries by the cast, ranging from stiff to recitative, under the direction of Vivienne Benesch. How am I supposed to reconcile my individual existence against the weight of those numbers?” Pretty heady stuff for an ordinary seventeen-year-old in Grand Rapids.īogged down by such contrived writing, Haidle’s problematic script ponders philosophical issues of life, creation, and the universe that don’t fit the personalities, ages, or circumstances of his characters. In the career of my soul, how many times have I turned from wonder?. The show opens with the young Ernestine Ashworth pondering the existentialist questions, “Have I wasted my life?. But here, 90 years in the life of one Michigan woman, from her seventeenth to her 107 th birthday, drag on over 90 minutes in her kitchen, while she bakes, but never completes, serves, or enjoys, the metaphorical cake across the decades (and on stage in real time), in this belabored look at transience, mortality, and cycles of existence. Inspired by Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner of 1931 – a 35-minute one-act play tracing five generations through a fast-moving 90 years of Yuletide meals in the family dining room – playwright Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles, making its COVID-delayed Broadway debut with Roundabout Theatre Company, offers yet another reminder of Virgil’s ancient maxim “tempus fugit” (“time flies”).

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