There’s a question left mostly unaddressed in the debates over gay rights and so-called religious freedom laws. Of course discrimination should be illegal, but why would anyone want a same-sex wedding cake made by a bigoted, antigay baker?
In The Cake, which opened tonight at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s off-Broadway space in City Center, playwright Bekah Brunstetter has found the circumstance: You’ll want an antigay baker to make your same-sex wedding cake when the cake guru in your North Carolina hometown is your dead mom’s best friend—and also a conservative Christian.
To Brunstetter’s great credit, that setup as revealed in her intriguing, timely play feels natural, not contrived. The Cake, which initially seems a goofy confection—and stars the inimitable Debra Jo Rupp, who specializes in ingenuously self-serious goofballs—turns out to be a thoughtful examination of changing cultural mores in which all sides have only the best intentions, even if they never quite see eye to eye.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★ review here.]
We meet Rupp’s Della first, in her eponymous cake shop, carefully icing her latest creation. She’s in a reverie, speaking of the importance of following a recipe precisely. It’s the key, she says, to making a great cake—and, we’ll soon enough learn, a metaphor for her view on life, in which there are precise rules for what should and should not be done. It’s a striking moment as directed by Lynne Meadow, a glowing Wayne Thiebaud tableau vivant that treats the cakes as virtual fetish objects. (John Lee Beatty has designed the sets.)
Then set pieces revolve and we’re in Della’s full establishment, a homey neighborhood bakery. She’s talking to a pleasant African-American woman (Marinda Anderson), Macy, who appears to be taking notes. It’s unclear whether this is an interview, a confessional, or just some idle chatter. It turns out it’s the last, and what we soon discover—but Della doesn’t—is that Macy and her bride-to-be, Jen (Genevieve Angelson), are in town to plan their wedding. Soon enough, Macy outs Jen—nee Jenny, in her younger days—to Della, who reacts with shock. Della, you see, sees Jen/Jenny as a surrogate daughter, but she also believes marriage is between a man and a woman. “I would love more than anything, truly anything in this world, to make your cake,” Della eventually tells Jen. “But I just — I can’t support — what you’re doing.”
Brunstetter has fun in her script. Della is set to compete on The Great American Baking Show, and there are dream-sequence moments in which Della’s anxiety manifests as fantasy (and fantastical) exchanges with the Baking Show judge. Rupp brings charm, daffiness, and heart to her character. And it’s refreshing to see a culture-war depiction that presents all its combatants as good-hearted and struggling. As much as Della is heartbroken by feeling she must condemn Jen, Jen is guilt-ridden about upsetting Della’s well-ordered world.
Ultimately, it turns out that Della’s world is less well-ordered than one might think. She and her goofusy but religiously domineering husband, Tim (Dan Daily), are in an affection but sexless marriage, and Della is frustrated. She wants more from life, both romantically and intellectually, and Jen is making her reassess her views, slightly.
In fact, Della can sometime feel a bit like Laura Bush in Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel American Wife — it’s a bit too convenient, perhaps, that a closet progressive is always lurking within a sympathetic conservative. Still, Rupp’s good nature makes the character work.
Macy, the interloping bride-to-be, is a tougher character to get a fix on, both devoted to Jen and also, sometimes, inexplicably unfeeling toward her plight. She’s also sometimes presented as the product of a progressive, tolerant world — “your Mom is a therapist,” Jen tells her. “She buys you weed. Your parents were never even married” — and elsewhere as someone whose father threw a Bible at her head when she came out and now doesn’t speak to her. Jen seems too passive, constantly put upon.
But even with its flaws, this play works, on the strength of its sympathetic takes and Brunstetter’s sharp script. The Cake, as it turns out, is sweet.
The Cake opened March 5, 2019, at City Center Stage I and runs through March 31. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
