James Newcomb and Margot White in "Birthday Candles."                                  Photo by Aaron Rumley

            For Ernestine Ashworth, 90 years elapse in 90 minutes.
            That’s the math of Noah Haidle’s “Birthday Candles,” a sweet yet sad portrayal of one woman’s life cycle.
            Sad because Haidle’s play is a reminder that even if one lives to be over 100, as Ernestine does, life is all too short. I tried to remain upbeat during this production of “Birthday Candles” at North Coast Repertory Theatre, and there’s plenty of comedic snappiness built into the script. But ultimately it’s sobering to take in that Ernestine, played with a natural grace and dignity by Margot White, keeps having birthdays while everyone around her passes away. The recurring image of her in her kitchen, baking that year’s celebratory cake, goes from joyous to poignant to practically devastating as the decades fly by.
            Haidle has said that his idea for “Birthday Candles” stemmed from learning that the memory span of a goldfish is only three seconds’ long. A goldfish in a bowl is literally onstage the entire show as if to remind us of not so much the brevity of its memory but of life itself.
            The heaviness of “Birthday Candles’” message is lightened, at least for the first half of the play, by Ernestine’s interactions with her Grand Rapids family – husband Matt (Martin Kildare), son Billy (Matthew Grondin) and daughter Madeline (who briefly changes her name to “Athena”), played by Katie Karel. Matt’s rather a bore, Billy’s anything but affable, and “Athena’s” depressed, but ever-calm Ernestine weathers every storm.
            Unlike the others in her circle, Ernestine is a deep thinker – she longs to know her place in the universe. At the same time, she’s grounded enough to navigate all the foibles of her family. This is a delicate balance for any actor. At North Coast Rep, White makes it work, makes us see inside her, makes us give a damn about Ernestine when perhaps no one else matters.
            Almost no one else. James Newcomb, who’s grand in the part, is an endearing presence as Kenneth, the earnest if awkward neighbor who’s loved Ernestine since they were children and who never misses a birthday party, gift in arms. Kenneth will become a much more significant figure in Ernestine’s life later on, which is bound to please audiences.
            Over the years that pass, Ernestine’s birthdays are visited by an extended family, with Karel, Kildare and Emelie O’Hara playing multiple roles. Dramas and melodramas intervene, as they will during most long lives. Ernestine, the dreamer and the rock, survives.
            To its credit, “Birthday Candles,” directed by David Ellenstein, manages Ernestine’s aging without silly props or makeup. White will eventually don spectacles or walk more tentatively or speak more haltingly, but no stage tricks are employed.
            There’s a sense as the play winds toward its conclusion that everything, including Ernestine, is shrinking. Even the snappy dialogue. Getting old is serious business, folks.
            For me, White’s beautiful performance transcends the play itself, which can feel a bit soppy. Its best scene actually is its very last, but maybe that’s how it should be.
            You may leave wondering about your own place in the universe. You may leave reminded that every moment we’ve got is precious. Either way, “Birthday Candles” will have done its job.
            “Birthday Candles” runs through June 29 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.

Vanessa Flores Cabrera in "La Llorona on the Blue Line."                          Photo courtesy of TuYo Theatre

            We’re all strangers on a train when we board the three vintage light-rail cars in which TuYo Theatre’s immersive “La Llorona on the Blue Line” is staged. Like functioning railway or trolley cars today none of the retired three comes equipped with seat belts. They should. “La Llorona” has its share of hold-on moments.
            The play comprised of three vignettes is written by Maybelle Reynoso, author of TuYo’s “Pastorela 2.0” produced five years ago. The company’s co-artistic director, Maria Patrice Amon, directs the cast of seven that performs inside the historic, 1880s-built National City Depot that’s run by the San Diego Electric Railway Association.
            The three retired cars date from different periods in San Diego rail transport history and Reynoso’s 15-to-20-minute-long vignettes are set in time accordingly: the first in 1920, the second in 1946, the third in 1982. Only 20 patrons are accommodated for each performance, owing to the limited seats aboard the trains. The actors, speaking both English and Spanish, perform in the aisles, just inches from viewers in some moments.
            Before I dive into “La Llorona,” my own experience Friday night, a chilly and misty one in National City:
            Given a “TuYo Railways” ticket and a program sheet (more on that later), I patiently waited among my fellow “passengers” in the quaint depot environs (really a hidden gem for local history buffs). After a uniformed train clerk (Arturo Medina) with a booming voice informed us that we’d be boarding soon, cast members in costume – pretty easy to distinguish from patrons – began to circulate, including a strange young woman in white and in tears.
            All aboard.
            Reynoso’s script concerns itself with, as Amon told me in an interview I did for the San Diego Union-Tribune, “gender equity and stories of women in the South Bay” and also with the La Llorona mother myth – the weeping woman/grieving mother haunted by her own tragic deeds. In the context of this play the La Llorona figure is redefined, no longer a murderess but a spectral figure exacting justice for imperiled or victimized mothers and, in one case, a potential mother-to-be.
            The frightening and beautiful La Llorona (Vanessa Flores) eerily compels passengers from car to car, flitting like some haunted butterfly. She is the omnipresence throughout the play.
            In the first car, dating from 1920, the “Bath Riots” of El Paso in which migrant Mexican women were deloused with gasoline are evoked as the complicit young Bobby (Julian Ortega Flores) is confronted by a stranger aboard the car over his crimes. As in all three vignettes, the white-clad, mask-wielding La Llorona lurks in the background – until she doesn’t.
            The narrative inside the 1946 car finds a newly pregnant girl (Tash Gomez) looking to her worldly wise older sister (Paloma Carrillo) for answers to her predicament and answers to what love and sex and sin are. The girls’ mother (Vanessa Duron) is having none of it. Again, La Llorona presides … and acts.
            The most harrowing of the three stories unfolds in the 1982 familiar red San Diego Trolley car. The scattered babbling of an intensive-care nurse (Nancy Batres) gives way to the unearthing by a fellow passenger, a mother (Duron), of a dark and unsettling secret that ultimately will send La Llorona into a frenzy. It goes down like a violent exorcism and made me wonder at the time how any patrons could bring a child along to this production – as one did the night I was there.
            When it was over, I longed for more dramatized stories. Even though I felt a little wrung out from the last vignette.
            I’ve ridden the modern-day Blue Line many times, including to and from the border, and no trip was ever like these.
            Now back to that program sheet: Turn over the printed information on cast and credits and there are two maps juxtaposed – the “Map of San Diego MTS Trolley System Now” and the “San Diego Electric Railway Map 1918.” Though the latter is kind of hard to read, it’s clear enough that mass transit was further reaching 100 years ago. One could, for example, take a light-rail train to and from the beach, or back and forth to far-flung parts from the Panama California Exposition grounds in Balboa Park. Today’s San Diego Trolley system is one that has expanded considerably since starting up in 1981, but it’s still lacking. The high price of SoCal real estate and the sheer cost of growing out has apparently limited its reach – look how long it took to get a line out to UCSD.
            But that’s a hot-button subject to be argued elsewhere and by those more knowledgeable and more invested than I.
            Let’s stick with “La Llorona on the Blue Line”” Unnerving at times but not off-putting. Thoughtful, no question. Cautionary, certainly. Mindful of the past, the present and what may lie before us, in reality and in myth.
            “La Llorona on the Blue Line” runs through June 21 at the National City Train Depot. Meanwhile, visit the National City Depot and the museum website at https://www.sdera.org/depot.php

Jenna (Lulu Lloyd) and Dr. Pomatter (Bryan Banville) become entangled in "Waitress."   Karli Cadel Photography

            Aug. 1 will mark 10 years exactly since the musical adaptation of Adrienne Shelly’s film “Waitress” made its stage debut at the American Repertory Theater located at Harvard University. This likable grownup musical with a book by Jessie Nelson and music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles would later run nearly four years on Broadway.
            Wednesday night in the drizzle at Moonlight Amphitheatre in Vista made it twice that I’ve seen “Waitress.” My first was seven years ago when the show came to the San Diego Civic Theatre as part of a national tour. As with a tasty slice o’ pie, it’s nice to have seconds.
            Ah yes, pie. You’ll want some by the time “Waitress” is over.
            There’s a connective thread between that 2018 touring presentation of “Waitress” and this one from Moonlight Stage Productions, and it’s a lulu. Musical theater performer Lulu Lloyd, a San Diegan who graduated from La Jolla High, starred as waitress/pie-baker Jenna Hunterson on that national tour (though not on the leg that stopped at the Civic). Five years after stepping aside from acting to have a family, Lloyd returns to the stage to star again as Jenna at Moonlight.
            You can see and hear that Lloyd knows this show inside and out. She’s the light and the strength of an altogether splendid cast in Vista. Welcome back, Lulu.
            Seeing “Waitress” again reminded me of the breadth and the versatility of Bareilles’ songwriting. The musical highlights two of her most touching and beautiful songs, “A Soft Place to Land” and “She Used to be Mine,” both admirably performed by Lloyd to the accompaniment of Moonlight’s “Waitress” orchestra (Stella Belauskas, Marc Encabo, Dave Fung, Michelle Gray, Robert Johnson, Don Kuhli and Josh Vasquez).
            At the same time, Bareilles flashed her gift for clever lyrics that heighten sight-gag- romps given to Jenna’s fellow waitress Dawn (“When He Sees Me”) and Dawn’s comical but sincere suitor Ogie (“Never Ever Getting Rid of Me” and “I Love You Like a Table”). Emma Nossal and Jonathan Sangster have a ball with these at Moonlight.
            The little grace notes of Bareilles’ score (like the echoey, recurring “sugar, butter, flour” that precedes the opening number “What’s Inside” and is heard most tenderly in “A Soft Place to Land”) lend this show nuance, and to an extent all of her songs for Jenna illuminate the reality that this waitress/pie baker’s life is really complicated while reassuring us that she’ll figure it out.
            Make that quite complicated. Before you can say “Order up!” Jenna’s queasy at the diner and her knowing co-workers Becky (Elizabeth Adabale) and Dawn (Nossal) are goading her to pee on a stick. Predictably, she’s preggers, and by her loser husband Earl (Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper, like Nossal playing against their usual types and succeeding).
            A reluctant trip to the gynecologist’s finds her regular doc gone and a handsome but awkward Dr. Pomatter (Bryce Banville, dependably good) attending to her instead. By the end of the first act, they are more than doctor and patient (“Bad Idea” – that’s the song title, and the truth).
            Mix in Jenna’s dream of winning a piemaking contest, the $20,000 that goes with it and the chance to dump Earl’s sorry butt in the process and “Waitress” finds its heroine in a whirl.
            Meanwhile, a lot of laughter is mined with wallflower Dawn’s courtship by Ogie, a slapsticky break from Jenna’s angst and forbidden romance. (Did I mention that Dr. Pomatter is married, too?)
            Now to Act 2. The first 10 minutes or so find everyone in heat. Jenna and her doctor are getting physical. So are Dawn and Ogie. So is Becky and Cal (Dallas McLaughlin), previously just the grouchy boss at Joe’s Pie Diner. This sequence is why Moonlight labels “Waitress” PG-13. It’s also why for many this show is so popular. Adults doing adult things. Leave the kids at home.
            The trio of director Noelle Marion, musical director Tamara Paige and choreographer Katie Banville ensure that this musical is in good hands, and it’s awesome to have female artists in charge of a story in which a woman finds her strength and finds herself.
            “Waitress” tidies everything up at the end, as you might figure, though Jenna’s romantic fling doesn’t go the way of cliché. Just as Adrienne Shelly wrote it years ago. Tragically (you can research the details yourself) she never lived long enough to see her film become a musical that likely will be produced and produced for years to come.
            During Wednesday night’s performance, I overheard one patron, possibly expecting a rerun of the old “Alice” sitcom, mutter to another patron: “Well, that was different.” I don’t think it was a compliment.
            But she was right. “Waitress” IS different, and from me that’s a compliment.
            “Waitress” runs through June 21 at Moonlight Amphitheatre in Vista. (Bring a blanket.)