Baking a cake, a pet goldfish and everything that should happen on a birthday — this is what Birthday Candles is about.
Calvin Theatre Company (CTC) is performing Birthday Candles, an original play by Noah Haidle, a playwright based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which made its Broadway debut in 2022. The play invites us to celebrate Ernestine Ashworth (Kait Boers) on her 17th birthday, where she is shockingly existential about her role in the universe. But soon, we follow her through her 18th, 41st, 70th and 101st birthdays. Other characters include her partner Matt (Tyler Scanlan), her children Billy (Redding Martin) and Madeline (Anna Smith), her grandchildren (played by some of the same actors) and Kenneth (Cami Mauriello), her nerdy childhood best friend.
It is a tradition for Ernestine to bake the Golden Butter Cake every year on her birthday, using a recipe passed down through generations. She recreates the same birthday cake each year and celebrates it with her loved ones as she ages from 17 to 101, without showing any external signs of aging. This process of baking one cake over the span of a century of Ernestine’s life allows the audience to witness a “life” in a true and pure way, filled with realistic moments that we sometimes fail to notice.
Through a cake and a goldfish — the fish with a memory span of just three seconds — we learn the importance of memory and its worst enemy: time.
Time is weird, they say. One minute it’s racing by and the next it’s dragging. A lot of this has to do with how we perceive it. It’s all about attention and focus: How do we want to spend our time? “Rest,” “take a minute,” “take a breath ”— these lines delivered by Ernestine remind us that time keeps moving forward in one direction, and there’s nothing we can do other than take a step back and breathe. We must see the things we completely miss: the world, the people we love and sometimes even ourselves.
CTC, once again, fills the Gezon Auditorium with laughter and tears. The homey ambiance of the set of a kitchen, the live baking show and the playful tone of the lighting all play a part in the narrative as we move through the different stages of Ernestine’s life.
Touching, dramatic and with flashes of humor, Birthday Candles is about love, loss and life, all dramatically shaped by time — the continuous, somewhat weird progression of existence that passes us by without us realizing it. It’s a simple narrative with very minimal characters, but perhaps it’s the simplicity that makes this play so poignant.
There are three shows left this weekend: Friday, Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, Feb. 8 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Be sure to secure a seat! Tickets are available online at the Calvin University ticketing website. Bring a friend and, perhaps, some tissues.
