That said, there were plenty of empathetic sniffles and sighs in the audience during the performance. The time-hopping conceit doesn’t allow us to get a real sense of the world beyond Ernestine’s kitchen. And he acknowledges that this work, his Broadway debut, is inspired by Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner,” which, like his classic “Our Town,” employs chronological jumps as a means of considering love, life and death in the stories of everyday people.Īt its most strained, “Birthday Candles” feels like an imitation of a superior work. In surreal plays like his 2016 “ Smokefall,” Haidle aspires to mix multigenerational family drama and poetic musings. In some ways this reach for the cosmic comes with the territory. (“You’re a shadow in a suit posing as a human, you should be ashamed of yourself,” sneer the teenage avatars of two generations, in one of the play’s funnier repetitions.) And the middle-aged adults wilt into the weary postures of seniors, with their sighs and ailments, right before our eyes. The teens, slouching from one end of the stage to the next, are unbearably self-righteous.

Vivienne Benesch’s direction exaggerates the methodical sentimentality of Haidle’s script, allowing broad, clichéd gestures to do shorthand work. Most of the cast, particularly Messing, who delivers an awkward caricature of a teen and then the exaggerated hand-wringing and dithering warble of an old woman, struggle in the sunrise and sunset years. These shifts are tough work for the actors, who must often convey their characters’ varied ages in succinct lines: a lifetime in just a few minutes. At some points it becomes a hassle to see the view from Ernestine’s family tree, given how quickly figures in her life disappear, and how children transform into grandchildren, then great-grandchildren. Down below, though, we are dutifully following an unrelenting parade of progeny embodied, “ Lehman Trilogy”-style, by Flood, Finn, Jelks and Livingston. It’s there that we neatly see how the personal can meet the universal.

Susannah flood family