What is the meaning of an ordinary life against the backdrop of the universe? That’s a big question, and playwright Noah Haidle takes a stab at answering it with his play Birthday Candles, now onstage at Florida Studio Theatre’s Gompertz Theatre.

It’s a play that might remind you a bit of some classic works, including Thornton Wilder’s Our Town or the film It’s a Wonderful Life. Haidle’s script never reaches the emotional depths of those standouts, but its mix of comedy and drama nevertheless will probably touch you.

The play’s main character, Ernestine Ashworth (Rachel Moulton), bursts onstage on her 17^th birthday, while her mother, Alice (Susan Haefner), is baking her a cake for the occasion. Ernestine’s full of grand pronouncements about her dreams; she proclaims herself “a rebel against the universe” and eschews all notions of marriage, children and a “normal” life. Hers, she is sure, will be special, beginning with starring onstage in her high school production of Queen Lear, a distaff version of the Shakespeare tragedy.

But it’s not long before a chime sounds, the lights change, and we move forward through time a year to the next birthday. Now Ernestine is on her own, although her adoring would-be boyfriend, Kenneth (Rod Brogan), would do anything to take her to the prom. She dashes his hopes, but it’s another story when Matt (Peter Kendall) asks her to be his date. Within minutes, Ernestine is being whirled through time, cake after cake, chime after chime, and taking measure of herself, her children and her grandchildren’s heights against a door frame in the kitchen.

There are highs and lows over the decades (we never have a sense of any particular eras here; there’s no mention of what might be happening in the outside world) as Ernestine grapples with love and loss. Her son, Billy (Freddie Lee Bennett), brings home a nervous, socially awkward girlfriend, Joan (Sarah Elizabeth Colt); her daughter, Madeline (Haefner again), struggles with apparent mental health issues; and husband Matt performs an act of betrayal. But Ernestine rejoices in grandchildren, takes a long-awaited trip abroad, and even opens a business—all the while faithfully attended by Kenneth and a frequently replaced goldfish named Atman, whose name represents in Hindu philosophy the true self.

If that sounds heavy, it’s mostly not. Haidle tosses in a lot of laugh lines, some of which land, some not so much, as history seems to repeat itself throughout the family’s lives. There are some sweet moments, mostly those with Kenneth involved. But if tears are going to fall, it’s most likely at the very end of the evening, when Ernestine turns up for the last time in what was her kitchen.

That kitchen, by the way, is a homey design by Isabel & Moriah Curley-Clay, with flower wallpaper and colorful appliances, as well as a counter where that cake is stirred and mixed and poured, time after time. It doesn’t change, and neither does Ernestine much in terms of aging, at least not until she hits her 80s. The spirit inside her, it seems, doesn’t change, either.

The cast, most of them playing several roles, feels committed, under Kate Alexander’s sensitive direction, to keeping the tone largely reflective, and they all come across fine with their performances. But as Ernestine, Moulton is the heart and soul of the production; if we didn’t engage with her so thoroughly from the first moment, Birthday Candles wouldn’t have the spark it needs.

Birthday Candles continues through May 17. For tickets, call (941) 366-9000 or visit floridastudiotheatre.org.