‘Birthday Candles’ a touching finale of the Buffalo Theatre Ensemble’s 2025-26 season
Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, the professional Equity theater company in residence at the McAninch Arts Center, presents Noah Haidle’s “Birthday Candles,” directed by Steve Sncott now through Sunday, June 7.
The performances take place at the intimate Playhouse Theatre, 425 Fawell Blvd. in Glen Ellyn. Note: this play contains adult themes and language.
“‘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 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 to 6 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday and two hours prior to performance.