Debra Messing's many birthday candles

 

     Birthday Candles’ playwright Noah Haidle was ambitious in attempting to present nine decades of a woman’s life in one 90-minute intermission-less play.  Unfortunately the result, now at the American Airlines Theatre under the direction of Vivienne Benesch, is an underdeveloped character marking her passing years by baking her own birthday cake each year.

     Emmy Award-winning sitcom darling Debra Messing (“Will & Grace”) has the unenviable task of bringing Ernestine Ashworth to life, starting with her 17th birthday and seeing her through into her 101st.  Onstage the entire time, she needs to suggest different ages through movement and voice since she can’t change costumes or wigs.  Wearing the same yellow, full-skirted dress and white sneakers (costumes by Toni-Leslie James), she adds an apron or cardigan and shifts her shoulder-length red hair from a high ponytail, to hanging long, to a bun (hair and wig design by Matthew B. Armentrout).  She didn’t look or sound much different to me until about the final 20 minutes and then she nicely conveys an elderly woman, with stooped posture, holding onto countertops for stability and speaking in a weakened voice.

     I also had a hard time time distinguishing the other characters.  Only her neighbor Kenneth (Enrico Colantoni), who has been in love with her since elementary school, remains the same.  John Earl Jelks plays a dual role, one of which is her husband, Matt.  That’s OK, but it was hard to keep track of their children and grandchildren and their significant others as Christopher Livingston, Susannah Flood and Crystal Finn juggle five generations of characters at different ages. 

     Haidle’s concept was intriguing but it makes for a play in which I never felt I really knew any of the characters, including the leading one.  Another problem is that the main action is the cake baking.  Snippets of dialogues about births, adultery and death pass for the plot.  Messing actually makes and bakes a cake over the course of the play, taking it out of the oven at the end.  I’m sure I would have enjoyed the smell if my nose hadn’t been covered by two masks.  While some people might find it engaging to watch someone at work in the kitchen, I, as a person who doesn’t cook or bake, was uninterested.  (My oven has been lit only once, in 1999, before I closed on my apartment.)   

     At least Christine Jones’ single set of a large blue and turquoise kitchen is enchanting.  Above it, seemingly in the sky, hang an assortment of household items, like a tricycle, teddy bear and umbrella. 

     I hope Messing will return to Broadway.  I enjoyed her performance the last time I saw her, in Outside Mullingar.  Now she’s trying to light too many candles.  The audience gets burned.