NEW YORK — In “Three Tall Women,” the great playwright Edward Albee identified what he called the “360-degree view.” It happens, he said, in your 40s or 50s, when you’re old enough to understand the folly of youth and still young enough to see and feel the agonizing decline of the generation ahead. For this and other reasons, older writers come with a built-in advantage when it comes to new plays.
If only Broadway, always obsessed with the young, better understood what it is missing.
The wonderful new drama “Birthday Candles,” which stars Debra Messing of “Will and Grace” fame, is a perfect example. For 90 minutes at the Roundabout Theatre on Broadway, face masks double as a means by which an emotionally wrought audience can wipe its eyes. No young person could have written this play; the pain and discoveries of the author are all over every beautifully written line.
The writer Noah Haidle once was a wunderkind New York playwright, the kind Broadway loves. But his life took various challenging turns, his career stalled, personal issues accumulated and he ended up back in Michigan, living with his parents. The first indication of his rich second act as a writer, born of his own challenges, was “Smokefall,” a beautiful family drama set (like “Birthday Candles”) in Grand Rapids that premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2014 and clearly was the work of a playwright who had come to understand one of life’s most profound truths.
“Smokefall” was an unforgettable play. “Birthday Candles” is even better.
Here’s what “Birthday Candles” is all about: As we age, we come to see that life is a series of losses and our happiness largely depends on how we deal with them. We also are forced to realize that people we had to come to think of as permanent fixtures of our consciousness walk out of the doors of our lives, their departures unanticipated and often traumatic.
We first meet the central character, Ernestine, when she is 17 years old, learning one of her family’s most abiding rituals: the baking of a favorite birthday cake. Over the course of the play, Ernestine ages in rapid succession as scenes from different stages of her life fly by — she marries, has children, loses people, makes rash decisions, recalibrates. By the end, she is an old woman clinging to the one ritual that roots her in our unsettling world.
Messing is exceptionally moving in this role. But the challenges of the play are not limited to the lead role — all of Ernestine’s fellow travelers age with her. And since people come in and out of families, an ensemble cast plays several roles each, parents morphing into partners into children. John Earl Jelks is Ernestine’s husband; Enrico Colantoni plays her road not traveled, a guy next door who loves her from prom to dotage, even as others fall away. And Christopher Livingston, whose performance deepens as it goes, plays Ernestine’s son.
The best work in the show comes from two women, Crystal Finn and Susannah Flood, who mostly play characters struggling yet failing to truly know themselves. They’re both extraordinarily strong, vulnerable and rich.
Haidle, who works elegant and probing prose into the quotidian language of just another day in Michigan, is in Thornton Wilder territory here. Like “Our Town,” “Birthday Candles” is telling us to slow down and live in the moment, appreciate the moment, take comfort in rituals like baking or measuring your height on the door frame, even if those around us think them ridiculous, as they usually do. And, above all, know that nothing and no one are forever.
The play is shot through with a Midwestern sensibility, for it is a picture of the search for meaning and happiness in a provincial city where little is likely to happen of consequence. Its theme is how we define what is of consequence. And how that changes.
There are times when Vivienne Benesch’s production, staged on a single setting from Christine Jones, does not fully exploit the epic, metaphysical sense of the writing; transitions are marked by annoying sound cues when we’d be fully aware of what transpires without them. Some moments are rushed, others too broad.
But those really are minor quibbles in a truly must-see show that is fully successful when it comes to everything that really matters. Messing didn’t pick some revival or obvious showcase for her comedic chops: She strives mightily and beautifully to find her way through a wise and sad drama, just like the character she plays.
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