A kitchen window in the Midwest.
A mother bakes cakes with her daughter.
A moment ago she was bathing her child in the tub, now it's already talking about the prom.
Stretches and stretches and swears with raised finger: "I will surprise God." How time flies.
Just take a breath, it seems, and life is over.
The mother dies and the daughter turns eighteen.
But the window in the kitchen remains the same.
Lets the light of the setting sun shine in as always.
And the smell of the freshly baked cakes out over the fields.
There are these beautiful lines from Truman Capote that paternal friends write in a poetry album with a wistful smile: “I was eleven, and later I turned sixteen.
I didn't earn any merit, but those were the wonderful years.” This tone follows the melodrama “Birthday Candles” by Noah Haidle, which has just premiered on Broadway in New York and is now also being shown at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.
It is a carefully constructed episodic play that follows the life of provincial beauty Ernestine Ashworth from her seventeenth to her one hundred and seventh birthdays.
And so accompanied as she goes from daughter to lover, from wife to mother, to aunt, mother-in-law and widow, from second wife to grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother.
A smooth change of roles, without regard to losses.
Atoms that have been there since creation
Her path through life seems like a long journey through the stations, as if her fate were predetermined and basically had no other constant than the same birthday cake made of "eggs, butter, sugar, salt - very simple ingredients, but if you take a closer look, you see Atoms that have been there since creation”.
The play by the screenwriter and dramatist Haidle, who was born in Michigan in 1978 and was also the resident author at the Mannheim Theater, is full of humour, tender wisdom and a tragic family history.
From afar, the mood is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder, of plays like We Came Away Again or Our Little Town.
The characters are lovingly drawn and yet never strive beyond a certain identity boundary: There is, for example, the unflattering-looking boy next door, Kenneth (played with soulfulness by Bernd Stempel), who has been madly in love with Ernestine since school days, but at first he only gets dislike from her.
She prefers to marry the sporty Matt and provides him with the whiskey glass.
But Kenneth consists of "heroic patience" and does not give up - when after thirty-five years the inevitable affair of the conventionally cheating husband is exposed, he is there and gratefully embraces his youthful flame.
A few happy years remain for the two, then cancer takes away the tolerant lover.