‘Birthday Candles’ is a touching finale of the Buffalo Theatre Ensemble’s 2025-2026 season

By Natalia Dagenhart

“The ingredients for the cake are simple: eggs, butter, sugar, salt. Look closer, though, and you’ll see the essence of life itself,” these are the most important words from the Noah Haidle’s ‘Birthday Candles’ production. A birthday cake becomes a symbol of life, stability, and continuation. It connects the past to the future for Ernestine Ashworth, the main character of the play.

Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, the professional Equity theater company in residence at the McAninch Arts Center (MAC), presents Noah Haidle’s ‘Birthday Candles’ directed by Steve Scott now through Sunday, June 7. The performances take place at the intimate Playhouse Theatre that is located at the MAC on the grounds of College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn.

“‘Birthday Candles’ follows Ernestine Ashworth from her 17th birthday through her 101st,” according to the press release for this production, “tracing five generations of dreams, heartbreaks and the extraordinary moments that make up one woman's ordinary life.”

Ernestine Ashworth spends her 17th birthday wondering what her place in the universe is and watches her mom baking a birthday cake. It’s an old recipe that came from her grandmother, and her mom is teaching her how to make it. Since then, many things have happened in Ernestine’s life, good and bad, but every year she keeps baking this cake.

The cake has become a sweet ritual for her and her family. She celebrates her 18th, 41st, 70th, and 101st birthdays while still baking the same cake and using the same basic ingredients: eggs, butter, sugar, salt. The simplicity of the ingredients symbolizes the simplicity of our life: it can be sweet, it can be salty, or it can be full and rich just like butter, and that’s what each of us goes through.

When you mix the ingredients, something beautiful comes out of it, and at the end you realize it’s not as simple as it might seem. The same about human life; the same about Ernestine’s life.

But what about the goldfish? It plays a big role in this story too. The fish itself lives a pretty short life and has a three second attention span, but one fish comes after another, as Ernestine keeps buying a new fish right after the old one dies. The fish becomes a symbol of eternity, which helps the main heroine of the play overcome her difficulties.

‘Birthday Candles’ was originally commissioned and produced by Detroit Public Theatre and developed as part of Chautauqua Theater Company’s New Play workshop series in 2017. The scheduled opening of it on Broadway in April 2020 became impossible because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It subsequently opened on Broadway in 2022, produced by Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theatre, with Debra Messing starring as Ernestine Ashworth. In November 2022, the play was translated into Hebrew and performed at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv, where it ran for two years. A Latvian language production opened the same month in the New Riga Theatre in Riga.

Haidle is a playwright and screenwriter whose work has been produced off-Broadway, regionally and internationally. His most recent play, ‘Everything Beautiful,’ premiered last October at Munich’s Residenz Theater, and he is currently the playwright in residence of the Mannheim National Theater in Mannheim, Germany. Haidle is a graduate of Princeton University and The Juilliard School, where he was a three-time winner of Lincoln Center’s Le Compte Du Noüy Award, and won the 2005 Helen Merrill Award for emerging playwrights, the 2007 Claire Tow Award, and an NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Grant.

Director Scott returns for his 11th production at BTE, where he most recently directed ‘Native Gardens.’ For more than 30 years Scott served as Producer at the Goodman Theatre where he is currently an artistic associate and board member. For his work as a director, Scott has received seven Jeff nominations, an After Dark Award, and numerous Broadway World Nominations. He received the 2017 Special Jeff Award for his contributions to the Chicago theater community and the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the League of Chicago Theatres.

The cast features Connie Canaday Howard (Ernestine Ashworth), Lisa Dawn (Alice, Madeline, Ernie), Robert Jordan Bailey (Kenneth), Rebecca Cox (Joan, Alex, Beth), Harry Hultgren (Matt, William), and Alexander Wisniewski (Billy, John). The design team includes Sarah Lewis (Scenic Design), Rachel Lambert (Costume Design), Garrett Bell (Lighting Design), Christopher Kriz (Composer and Sound Design), and Ab Rieve (Properties Design). The Stage Manager is Amy Creuziger. Chris Yee is the Assistant Stage Manager, and Olivia Delgado is the Student Assistant Stage Manager (BTE Scholar).

“On one level, Noah Haidle’s play is as simple as the ingredients in that cake: an exploration of the hopes, realities, exuberant victories, and crushing disappointments that we all find in our own lives,” wrote Steve Scott in the Director’s Note. “But through its portrait of four generations of a ‘typical’ family, Birthday Candles becomes something much, much more: a bracing, heartbreaking and often absurdly funny rendering of our connections to the mysteries of the past and future, and the grand patchwork that is human existence.”

Tickets are $48. For tickets or more information visit atthemac.org/events/birthday-candles/ or call 630-942-4000. The Box Office is open noon – 6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and two hours prior to performance. Please note: this play contains adult themes and language.

Natalia Dagenhart