Skip to main content
Early in Susan Soon He Stanton’s sublime, soulful play Today Is My Birthday, two characters appear on a radio show. One is a single woman named Iris and one is an “office stud” named Keoni who may or may not be in search of a girlfriend. Iris sounds desperate and Keoni sounds obnoxious, but they chat amiably and agree to go on a date.
There’s just one problem: It’s all fake. Both characters are actors hired by the show, so they aren’t really starting a romance. They’re just going through the romantic motions—and betting on the belief that their audience will prefer a slickly staged flirtation to the messiness of the real deal.
Or will they? That question lurks behind every scene in Today Is My Birthday, a play told almost entirely through phone calls that Artists Repertory Theatre turned into an audio production. Nearly every phone call is a performance in some respect, but the truth has a way of creeping into even the most facile conversations. That’s what happens to Iris, who is actually named Emily and is played movingly by Christina Uyeno.
Today Is My Birthday, directed by Dámaso Rodríguez, begins with Emily in emotional free fall. She has returned home to Hawaii after earning a master’s degree from Columbia University, but coming back hasn’t brought her comfort. She has split up with her boyfriend (Fajer Al-Kaisi), her parents (Emily Kuroda and Greg Watanabe) are getting divorced, and despite her desire to become a journalist, she is languishing as a technical writer.
When Emily is cast in a skit on a radio show hosted by two hilariously sleazy showboats, DJ Loki (Andrés Alcalá) and DJ Solange (Andrea Vernae), the gig seems like a joke. Yet she feels inexplicably drawn to her scene partner, Franklin (Ken Yoshikawa). She could be confusing fantasy and reality, but Franklin does seem like someone who could alleviate her loneliness.
What actually happens is more complicated and more interesting. The relationship between Emily and Franklin isn’t the focal point of Today Is My Birthday—the play is a sonic universe of disparate and delightful characters, including Bill Tapia (William “Bill” Earl Ray), a mischievous musician who becomes the subject of an article written by Emily, and Halima (Zeina Salame), a woman who writes lurid, fictitious diary entries to torment her snoopy husband.
We discover these characters through Emily—and the more they talk to her, the more we get to know her. Gradually, Stanton reveals the details of a tragedy that threatens to devour Emily’s soul. When we finally understand the depth of her grief, we understand why she lives so much of her life on the phone. It isn’t just because Stanton made a structural choice—it’s because Emily is using her phone as a shield to protect herself from a world that has left her emotionally destroyed.
While you might think that restricting the story to phone calls would curb the play’s narrative reach, the opposite is true. There’s something beautiful about the fact that Stanton allows us to imagine many of the most important moments in the characters’ lives, including Emily and Franklin’s first date. We don’t need to know exactly what happened—knowing how each person feels about what happened is enough.
During its final scene, Today Is My Birthday starts to feel like too much. Emily has a fraught relationship with her home state (“I love aspects of Hawaii, but not myself in it,” she explains), but Stanton shoves that conflict aside in favor of a tidy resolution that swiftly solves Emily’s career and family crises. After reveling in the magic of the unseen and unheard, the play works painfully hard to reveal and explain.
It would take more than a few didactic notes to diminish the sheer emotional force of Today Is My Birthday. Since the play was first performed in 2017, Stanton probably never imagined how prescient a story stripped of in-person communication would seem in 2021, but Today Is My Birthday is a reminder that talking on the phone can be both limiting and liberating. It probably saved the lives of many people during the pandemic and it arguably saves Emily’s.
LISTEN: Today Is My Birthday streams at artistsrep.org/performance/today-is-my-birthday through June 30, 2022. Free to sliding scale.