Chautauqua Theater Company Guest Artist Ceci Fernández, left, as a young Ernestine Ashworth, smiles as Conservatory Actor Amara Leonard, as her mother, Alice, measures Ernestine for her birthday during the final dress rehearsal for Birthday Candles on July 5 in Bratton Theater. CTC’s production of Noah Haidle’s Birthday Candles continues its run with performances at 4 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday in Bratton.
Much like Noah Haidle, the playwright of Chautauqua Theater Company’s mainstage season opener Birthday Candles, director Arya Shahi admires the writing work of Thornton Wilder.
Wilder’s play, A Long Christmas Dinner, inspired the plot of Haidle’s show, which began as a 2017 New Play Workshop at Chautauqua, rose to Broadway, and has been performed around the world. It follows one ordinary woman through nine decades of life, on her birthday, as she experiences love, loss and continues her family’s long tradition of baking a golden butter cake.
When Shahi first read the Birthday Candles script, he was instantly captivated by its poetic writing and elements that felt like magic.
“I love shows and pieces of art that elevate the mundane into something mythic,” he said. “The play felt like a really natural fit just for my aesthetic.”
Featuring a live goldfish and a real cake being baked onstage by Guest Artist Ceci Fernández, who plays Ernestine Ashworth, the show continues its run with performances at 4 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday in Bratton Theater. It will close July 21.
A director, actor and writer, Shahi is co-founder of PigPen Theatre Co. and a co-creator of the Tony Award-nominated musical Water for Elephants. He connected with Haidle’s play as soon as he read it.
“As a writer, it’s really fun to watch Noah build this perfect machine, and there’s a really beautiful payoff at the end of the show,” Shahi said. “I’m always looking at promises fulfilled, and he does that gloriously.”
While learning the story and guiding CTC’s rehearsal process, which was less than three weeks, he sees himself reflected in every character, particularly in the arcs of Ernestine and Kenneth — Ernestine’s nerdy and persistent next-door neighbor, played by Guest Artist Alex Weisman.
Shahi said that such a tight rehearsal window allowed the actors to forget about making mistakes, lead with their first impulses and take risks while on stage. Productions with longer runways may allow for more exploration and growth, but he said Birthday Candles was rooted in adaptability and flexibility.
“I have so much respect for the performers,” he said. “I think my job was just to kind of build the world with them and make sure that they understood how we were solving some of the bigger questions of the play.”
As Birthday Candles depicts the sometimes-heavy experiences and circumstances that span throughout 90 years of Ernestine’s life, Shahi said he was enthralled by watching how Chautauqua audiences reacted during previews.
He believes future audiences will truly witness a journey.
“It’s kind of incredible to hear the different sounds people make, and the different acknowledgments that I see in their body language,” he said. “It’s really special because we deal with big topics in the show, like the loss of family members, divorce and breakups, and you can tell that this is an audience that has lived those things.”
After the curtains close and the theater lights come up, he hopes Chautauquans will take notice of the things they hold close to their hearts and value the present moment.
Birthday Candles contains time-jumping elements that explore what is outside of reality, and Shahi said Haidle was insistent on having two special live elements — a real cake being baked and a goldfish onstage — to ground the story.
Building onto Haidle’s concept, scenic designer Brittany Vasta created the set to resemble a fishbowl, adding to the play’s dimensions of reality.
Shahi said that, with its stereotypically short memory span, the goldfish serves as a core metaphor to let go of the past, live in the present and hope for the future.
“It allows us to lie in art and make it true,” he said. “That’s what makes art deeply powerful, because we’re just lying up there.”
