- May 6, 2026
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Before Rachel Moulton started performing in Florida Studio Theatre’s “Birthday Candles,” she took a trip to Texas in March to celebrate her grandmother’s 93rd birthday with other members of her family. Moulton used the occasion for a trial run of baking a cake, which she does onstage during Noah Haidle’s play.
As Ernestine Ashworth, Moulton ages from 17 to 107 in “Birthday Candles.” But she does it in a series of snapshots, each of which takes place on her birthday. It’s a day she honors by baking a cake from scratch and recording her height on the kitchen wall. Both traditions are imparted to Ernestine by her mother, Alice.
Ernestine’s birthday cake contains the standard ingredients of butter, flour, eggs and sugar, but it also calls for some unusual elements. According to Alice, the recipe includes “stardust, the machinery of the cosmos” and “atoms left over from creation.” These cosmic ingredients underscore the thread of finding wonder in the quotidian that runs throughout the play .
In a recent interview, Moulton said she wasn’t nervous about aging 90 years during a 90-minute play. After 14 years on the FST stage, Moulton is a veteran shapeshifter. She’s played a variety of leading ladies of various ages and temperaments. Moulton also credits the teamwork among her “Birthday Candles” cast members with helping her pull off her accelerated character development.
What did concern Moulton about playing Ernestine was the logistics of baking the cake that emerges from the oven near the end of the play. (You can even smell it in the back rows of the theater.)
Experienced bakers know it takes more to bake a care than mixing all the ingredients together in a bowl unless you’re using a cake mix.
Moulton got the baking lesson she needed in Texas. She and her family also were able to collectively mourn the recent death of her younger sister. As fate would have it, grief is one of the ingredients Moulton uses for her performance in “Birthday Candles.”
Ernestine loses several loved ones during the course of her long life. Not all of them die; some move away from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the play takes place, while others are lost to mental illness or dementia.
“You know, after losing my sister, in a weird way, it’s like I was given this company of angels,” she says. “I can’t tell you the last time, or if ever, I have worked with such a generous, fierce group of people. I think we all have a sense of theater magic with this piece. A lot of that has to do with the space that our director (Kate Alexander) curated.”
In “Birthday Candles,” while Moulton ages, most of the other actors play multiple roles, displaying their own versatility in the process. Susan Haefner is a standout as Ernestine’s mother, daughter and great- granddaughter.
Other actors deftly juggling multiple roles are Peter Kendall, Freddie Lee Bennett and Sarah Elizabeth Colt. We won’t list all their characters, lest we have to include a family tree the way Russian novels do.
The only other character besides Ernestine who remains constant is Kenneth, a nerdy boy next door played by Rod Brogan. Kenneth’s ardor for Ernestine never dims over the years, despite numerous rebuffs.
They start with a cool reception for a goldfish named Atman (Hindu for “the divinity within”) that he gives Ernestine on her 17th birthday. Atman’s successors remain on the kitchen table during an unspecified period of time that appears to run from the 1920s to the 2020s.
With her fresh-faced, ingenue demeanor, Moulton can pull off playing a rebellious teenager who vows to “wage war with the everyday” and “surprise God.” She admirably demonstrates her stagecraft by persuading the audience that she’s aging as the play skips ahead to her 18th, 41st, 70th and 107th birthdays, with just minor tweaks to her costume and hair.
How does she do it? “Subtly” is the answer.
“Every year, she measures herself and writes the number on the wall. When she measures herself at 70, she says, ‘Oh, the decline has begun’ because she’s getting shorter. So I just thought how slowly my body would get smaller and also a little bit more stiff. My center of gravity changes. Identifying those physical markers and experiencing them in rehearsals was the most helpful for me,” Moulton says.
Over the years, Ernestine’s voice becomes more muted. As she ages, she speaks more slowly and with more breath between her words. That’s something Moulton says she and Brogan worked on together as they rehearsed scenes.
When a theater such as FST licenses a play for production, the script comes with a summary of each character’s background, motivation and personality known as a "dramaturgy." But Moulton also did her own research on Ernestine.
Moulton is the daughter of two professors whose work took them to colleges in Georgia, Tennessee and Florida. They passed their love of research down to her.
“I was wondering why the playwright picked the name ‘Ernestine.’ When I looked up what the name means, one of the first definitions is ‘battle to the death,’ which I love,” she says.
Ernestine “has this grit and gusto, and I would say, this radical determination. As she moves through the river of life, she’s always fighting for something — herself, her children, her grandchildren,” Moulton says. “Even though her journey does not take her where she envisioned it would, she never gives up.”
Given the odds of succeeding in a competitive profession, actors are usually quite enthusiastic when they are interviewed about their current job. Why? Because they are working! Occasionally, you hear a complaint about being typecast. Fortunately for the chameleon-like Moulton, it’s not a problem she has ever confronted.
In her tenure at FST, she has been cast in a wide range of roles. In FST’s 2025 production of “The Cancellation of Lauren Fine” she drew on her parents’ academic background to portray a professor who gets caught up in campus politics.
In FST’s 2023 Depression-era production “Black Pearl Sings!” Moulton played a musicologist trying to persuade a Black woman to record African American standards that have been orally passed down.
That role was challenging for two reasons, Moulton says. First, it required her to learn how to play the autoharp. Second, there wasn’t a lot of information available to inform her portrayal of the character Susannah Mullally, whose music preservation efforts mirror those of real-life “song-hunters” Alan and John Lomax during the 1930s.
Moulton’s favorite roles have been in FST’s edgy, Stage III series. They include “Ugly Lies the Bone” (2024), in which she played a veteran who bears both physical and emotional scars from three tours in Afghanistan, and “Grounded” (2017), about a female fighter pilot assigned to oversee drone sorties when she becomes pregnant.
“Grounded” left an impression on audience members too. “I was walking with one of my castmates this past weekend on Main Street and some people recognized us. I’ve had that happen before, with people who saw ‘Grounded.’ That’s when I go, ‘Wow.’ If someone can remember a performance nine years later, they were definitely shaken.”
Being recognized on the street is likely to happen more often since Moulton recently moved here. A graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, Moulton headed to New York City after earning her bachelor of fine arts from Syracuse University. Brooklyn remained home even after she became a regular at FST and later joined its full-time staff as an associate artist and development associate.
After adding the role of director of education in 2024, it made less sense to be “a millennial snowbird,” Moulton says, since her expanded position regularly takes her into schools and elsewhere in the community.
It’s a role she relishes. “This is truly my dream job,” she says. “I never thought it would be possible to work as an actor playing such incredible roles at a theater that truly believes in my artistry. To be able to grow as a teacher and as a theater administrator, I feel really grateful and lucky.”
