GOOD THINGS, SMALL PACKAGES

OVER THE COURSE OF 90 MINUTES, THE MAIN CHARACTER OF NOAH HAIDLE’S Birthday Candles goes from age 17 to 101. Each scene marks another birthday for Ernestine, who poignantly moves through life’s highs and lows as she prepares a birthday cake before the audience’s eyes.

That flash-forward process is not unlike the story of the theatre that helped birth the play. When it was announced this summer that Birthday Candles would be part of Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2019-20 season, it did not mark the familiar end point of a new play’s long, arduous journey to Broadway. In fact it was a very short trip: Detroit Public Theatre, itself formed in 2015, commissioned the play in the fall of 2016.

This quick success for the theatre, which had a budget of $494,500 for its inaugural season, was a happy surprise, says Sarah Clare Corporandy, who co-leads DPT alongside fellow founders Courtney Burkett and Sarah Winkler. But it hardly came out of the blue. It was instead the result of an intensive process, as is often the case for small theatres, that relied on a lot of hard work, collaboration, and support from others. A grant from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation bankrolled the project, and Corporandy’s connection as managing director of Chautauqua Theater Company in western New York meant it had a venue for a workshop.

“One of the reasons I think we’ve been so successful is because we take risks, and if something feels scary, we kind of feel like that’s the thing we should do,” Corporandy says. A “financially smart but artistically risky” attitude has helped the three DPT co-founders pursue exciting projects on the local and national levels: not only but also a co-production of with Baltimore Center Stage, a LORT theatre with a budget of around $8 million. DPT has fostered connections