Birthday Candles by Noah Haidle is my favorite kind of a play. It turns the ordinary extraordinary. It makes the mundane mythic. This play is pure surprise in the same way our long lives feel short in retrospect. The story lasts a century in the time it takes to bake a single birthday cake. And when it’s over, everything has changed but nothing is different. Now, perhaps you’re sitting down in our theater after a very-rigorous-intellectually-stimulating-day-of-real-world-living and my words strike you as simplistic or overly sentimental ... but I’ve spent the past six months enrapt by this script and that is the effect (and the genius) of Noah Haidle. He boils our complex lives down to their core ingredients. He will make a poet of you. 

The cast and creative team have been nothing short of tremendous, bold, and bravely weird in their exploration of these ideas. Each designer was tasked with creating a world that feels real while existing just outside of realism. The resulting space is a place where the heart, the mind, and the imagination can all throw a party together. Each actor was asked to be constantly present, literally and figuratively, jumping through life at its most beautiful, and brutal, and romantic, and ridiculous, establishing — then breaking — the routines that end up defining us. As a director, I must take a moment to acknowledge this gargantuan task. What the cast, crew, and creative team have accomplished here is not easy, but their dedication has made it look simple.  

How lucky I am to have helped tell this story with these people this summer. Like Atman The Goldfish, our star actor with a three-second memory span, I wish I could forget the show and see it anew each night. But instead, I get the second best thing: I get to offer you “the genius of a party. A rest. A song. A wish. A breath. And then home.”

Enjoy, 

Arya Shahi