So it's surprising that the play isn't titled Birthday Cakes. After all, there’s a running thread throughout the play that Ernestine is always in the kitchen making her own cake, whatever else is happening in her life and who is part of her life at the time—there’s her mom Alice (who dies before her daughter turns 18); Kenneth, a neighbor who keeps dropping in to remind her of his lifelong crush; Matt, whom she marries instead (then divorces); her two children, Billy and Madeleine; grandchildren; and a daughter-in-law.

 

The gimmickry is all around: in the play itself, from the repetition of Ernestine’s birthdays, of the dialogue, of the actions (annual pin the tail in the donkey, anyone?) to the same actors playing different people in Ernestine’s life; in Vivienne Benesch’s staging, which is always busy—all those characters flitting through Ernestine’s life, moving on and offstage, and that insistently repeated ringing bell that signals another birthday; and in several of the performances, which are pitched too high and too broadly as they all but nudge audience members in their ribcages to remind them of how sweet, substantial, and profound it all is. 

 

Too bad that it’s mostly sentimental and treacly, much closer to soap opera than it wants to be, and if a stray tear might form while one watches, it’s likely because one or more of the big life events shown or alluded to—a child’s suicide, an ex-husband’s stroke, an senile old woman’s return to the house that used to be her home—hits close to home.

 

Standing tall throughout there is, at least, Debra Messing. For 90 minutes, she is at center stage, with no makeup to easily assist in showing her quickly accelerating age, and she almost manages to make Ernestine into a living, breathing person. She even nearly manages to wring a grain of truth and dignity from the play’s final images, even though she should be the focus, not—as writer and director have it—her mother cradling the baby Ernestine, the final of many missteps in Birthday Candles.