A true gift: Connie Canaday Howard delivers exceptional performance in BTE’s ‘Birthday Candles’
“Birthday Candles” — 4 stars
Over the years, actor/director Connie Canaday Howard has done exceptional work with Buffalo Theatre Ensemble. Most recently, the longtime artistic associate and managing artistic director emerita played a loving wife who is slowly losing her husband to Alzheimer’s disease in BTE’s production of “The Outgoing Tide” by Bruce Graham.
Howard’s performance was moving. But she outdoes herself in “Birthday Candles,” the affecting Noah Haidle dramedy that concludes the company’s 39th season, giving what may be one of the best performances of her career in director Steve Scott’s warmhearted production.
She plays Ernestine Ashworth, a self-styled “rebel against the universe” whose lifetime of love and loss, hope and grief, missed opportunities and second chances spans 90 years and unfolds over 100 minutes.
We encounter Howard’s Ernestine on a series of birthdays, beginning with her 17th, which commences with a question.
“Have I wasted my life?” she asks her mother Alice (Lisa Dawn), whose response is appropriately conciliatory to the young woman who vows “to surprise God.”
“You’re 17,” says Alice, who enlists her daughter’s help in their annual tradition: baking a birthday cake “made up of stardust and atoms left over from creation.”
The distinct aroma of vanilla, butter and sugar in the theater confirms actual baking takes place during the show. Unfortunately for theatergoers, samples are not included.
Fast forward a year. Her mother has died, but Ernestine maintains their tradition, presiding over the birthday baking from her tidy Grand Rapids, Michigan, kitchen designed by Sarah Lewis and set against the cosmos. The nighttime sky surrounds the stage, its stars spilling onto the floor. (Credit lighting designer Garrett Bell for the lovely effect).
The juxtaposition of the infinite and the ordinary makes for a striking image, one that makes the life of a middle-class Midwesterner feel small by comparison.
For Haidle, the opposite is true. It’s in the celebration of those ordinary moments that “Birthday Candles” reveals Ernestine’s extraordinary life and the impact she has on those orbiting around her.
Over successive birthdays, we meet neighbor and not-so-secret admirer Kenneth (Robert Jordan Bailey) and prom-date-turned-husband Matt (Harry Hultgren). Later, we’re introduced to troubled daughter Madeline (Dawn), defiant son Billy (Alexander Wisniewski) and Joan (Rebecca Cox), Billy’s comically neurotic girlfriend and eventual wife.
Scott has assembled a first-rate ensemble who slip easily into their multiple roles as children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. (Howard and Bailey excepted).
A master of domestic drama who also directed Howard in “The Outgoing Tide,” Scott is especially skilled at uncovering a play’s inherent humanity. “Birthday Candles” — which had its Chicago premiere at Northlight Theatre in 2023 — is no exception. Affectionate but not overly sentimental, it is at its core honest.
The same can be said of the acting, most notably Howard, who ages from 17 to 107 without the aid of special makeup, prosthetics or wigs.
Hers is a wonderfully subtle transformation achieved through almost imperceptible shifts in posture, gait and vocal cadence. It’s a luminous performance by an actor at the height of her powers.
And for theatergoers, it’s a gift.
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Location: Buffalo Theatre Ensemble at the McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell Blvd., Glen Ellyn, (630) 942-4000, BTEchicago.com, AtTheMac.org
Showtimes: 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday through June 7
Tickets: $48
Running time: About 100 minutes, no intermission
Rating: For teens and older: includes mature subject matter, references mental illness and death