My Play Reviews
Birthday Candles (written by Noah Haidle, directed by Ron May) follows the life of one woman, Ernestine (Maureen Dias Watson) who ages in the course of the ninety-minute play from seventeen to one-hundred-and-seven looking for “her place in the universe.” It is also a play with thematic roots in ancient Hindu texts.
It is not a perfect play. I don’t understand, for example, why the playwright wrote Ernestine’s daughter-in-law (Lauren Isherwood) Joan’s character to be inordinately anxious or why her daughter Madeline (Patti Davis Suarez) is troubled and dies so young. It isn’t a perfect vehicle for understanding the Upanishads either, but it is a good play and the cast at Theatre Artists Studio is excellent so that we are riveted as we watch Ernestine age. Each scene takes place on her birthday, and in each she is making a cake out of “the humblest ingredients”—eggs, butter, sugar, salt—and we are told that these are atoms left over from the beginning of the universe.
When Ernestine is eighteen, Ernestine’s enamored next-door neighbor Kenneth (Tom Koebel), brings her a goldfish. He has named it “Atman” and explains that Atman means “the divinity within oneself.” It is “the larger Self,” the Self that can merge with the Divine. Of course, goldfish don’t live very long, so in the course of the play, there are one hundred and three Atmans. Perhaps this is an allusion to reincarnation, i.e., the many lives Hindus believe we each pass through as suffering ends and we approach enlightenment. Like the goldfish’s three-second memory, in each lifetime, “the world begins anew.”
The Upanishads teach that all beings are connected and that we can find our place in the universe by fully understanding ourselves. The Atman being the essence of a person, it is a Self that is unchanging and eternal. Eventually, if one attains true knowledge of oneself, the small self merges with Brahman (the Divine essence; in Buddhism, the Buddha nature; in Christianity, Christ Consciousness).
When Ernestine is fifty, Kenneth brings her a telescope so she can indeed find her place in the universe. Spoiler alert. She eventually does, but it is not the earth-shattering journey she hoped it would be—a life she believes at seventeen will “surprise God.” Nonetheless, it is what Ernestine was meant to be, her true essence. To me, it appears that Kenneth, too, finds his true Self.
My favorite line in the play is during the life of Atman the seventy-second when Ernestine and Kenneth are both eighty-eight years old. The genius of a party, says Ernestine (and remember that each scene takes place on her birthday) is “To stake a claim in an hour [from the daily human errand] and say ‘I will notice this.’” If we do not engage, if we do not notice ourselves, we cannot hope to find our place in the universe, and possibly merge with the Divine.
The cast is well rounded out by Johnny Kalita as Matt and Seth Tucker as Billy. Birthday Candles runs in Scottsdale only one more weekend and I recommend you get tickets: 7:30PM on Friday and Saturday (January 31 and February 1st)
Birthday Candles
by Noah Haidle
Patti Davis Suarez as Alice and Maureen Dias Watson as Ernestine in Birthday Candles, #theatreartistsstudio, January, 2025
Maureen Dias Watson as Ernestine and Tom Koebel as Kenneth, #theatreartistsstudio, January, 2025
Ghosts of Bogota
by Diana Burbano
This is the kind of quirky, intoxicating theatre that can draw (and did on opening night) a young multi-cultural audience to a literary genre mostly attended by older white folk--a play that asks compelling questions. What a breath of fresh air! How quirky? Diana (per the play's dialogue) might not have wanted to write a play in magical realism, but it is. Suffice it to say that one of the characters is a disembodied live head of Jesus. Brush up on your Spanish before you see this play. There's a lot of it, but anything you must know is mostly explained by the English surrounding it.
Cyrano de Bergerac
Adaptation by Kate Hawkes and Scott Coopwood
Red Earth Theatre, Sedona, Arizona
Kate Hawkes and Scott Coopwood's adaptation of the original 4-hour script is remarkable and Red Earth Theatre's 2022 production had power and heart. Details created by the sound technician, set outdoors in the courtyard of Tlaquepaque of Sedona, Arizona drew us into the emotional headspace of the characters. Taken to another time and place, surrounded by Tlaquepaque's already ethereal setting, one is easily drawn in The new spare script, far more suited to the attention span of modern audiences deserves attention by theatres across the country.
Paper Towels
by Nelson Diaz-Marcano
find it on New Play Exchange
Wow! Drawn by the title, I just read this play on New Play Exchange and everything about it is perfect, and the way it weaves together and responds to the issues of gun control, racism, war, twisted truth, and Hurricane Maria (both actual and metaphorical) and its effect on the people of Puerto Rico is astonishing. I speak Spanish, not perfectly and I am not Puerto Rican, but it seems to me that Diaz-Mariano's dialogue is absolutely right, and it carries the story along so you can't stop reading. I agree with Rachael Carnes who also reviewed the play on NPE, "this play is a freight train." It's the kind of play that encourages me to improve so that one day I might write a play as powerful as this. Paper Towels needs to be produced and now!
The Ferryman
by Jez Butterworth
The Gielgud Theatre, London
August, 2017
Best play I've ever seen. I'm sorry I didn't write a review as soon as I got home to my friends in Welwyn Garden City. Five out of five stars even though I could only hear or understand half the dialogue! This perfect script has humor, pathos, tenderness, deep family, love, conflict, physicality, melancholy, loss, music, dance, magic, old stories, lost memories, and of course my heritage as an Irish woman. And the cast--astonishing!. See it. In the UK if possible.
Shelter in Place
by Rachael Carnes
find it on New Play Exchange
The interaction of the immediacy of being right inside a school shooting and the indifferent facts of what happens when a semi-automatic gun creates havoc inside soft human flesh is only one of the things that makes this play so powerful. There are also the words to the children, "It's okay. Shh;" the emotionless words of the shooter in response to the small child who doesn't want to be there, "Well, you're here"; and the end, which is the beginning, "Shelter in place."