Another candle on her cake

From This Is Us to The Cake, Bekah Brunstetter has a full plate

In The Cake, a baker, congenial and accommodating in just about every other respect, refuses to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Sound familiar? The play was inspired in part by a run of similar rebuffs across the country — by vendors who felt that it would compromise their religious beliefs to help commemorate such unions. In most cases, the bakers and spouses-to-be are strangers, but what if they weren’t? What if the baker were the best friend of the bride’s mum, a lifelong friend, practically kin?

The predicament is at the heart of The Cake, a play by Bekah Brunstetter that is having its world premiere at the Echo Theater Company in Los Angeles. Brunstetter has been writing and workshopping the drama since 2015, after reading about the cake-based conflicts across the country and wondering what would happen if she herself were ever to bring a female lover home to meet her folks (she is straight; her parents are against gay marriage).

But what began life as an intensely personal piece has gained heat by the recent Supreme Court decision to hear Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a case involving a self-proclaimed “cake artist” who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple in 2012. “The timing could not have been crazier,” Brunstetter said recently.

“My friends were texting me, ‘ The Echo Theater has really good PR people. It’s like their press release went right to the Supreme Court’.”

The playwright was in a café within walking distance of her Los Feliz home, talking about the evolution of the play, her North Carolina upbringing, and her deep and abiding love for cake (pink lemonade is her absolute favourite). Sporting a white T-shirt and lavender nails, Brunstetter lives in Los Angeles but still longs for the South; at one point, she talked wistfully of sitting on her parents’ deck on quiet evenings and looking out at the trees, as big rigs racing along Hyperion Avenue here took turns drowning out her voice.

In addition to staging her latest play — which has already garnered rave reviews and has runs scheduled for Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; La Jolla, California; and Houston — Brunstetter has spent the last couple of years writing for two of the hottest shows on TV: American Gods, the Starz series based on the acclaimed fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman, and This Is Us, the award-winning NBC dramedy on which she’s also a producer.

That heartbreaking scene in This Is Us in which the young, plump Kate gets that mean note from the other little girls, saying they don’t want to play with her any more?

“That happened to me in elementary school,” Brunstetter said. “I was a really fat kid, and I was given that note at lunch.” She continued: “I will never forget that.”

But as a writer, she admits, you kind of want that awful pain: grist for the mill, and all that. With The Cake, she drew a lot from her experiences growing up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, alongside three brothers, all of whom served or are serving in the Marines, and attending a southern Baptist church, which she said was all about love, “not the fire-and-brimstone kind”.

In the play, Jen (Shannon Lucio) returns to her hometown in North Carolina to marry Macy (Carolyn Ratteray), an African-American New Yorker who doesn’t eat gluten (and, hence, cakes) and doesn’t particularly care for the South. When Jen enlists Della (Debra Jo Rupp), who loves baking and Jen almost as much as she loves Jesus, to create her wedding cake, it nearly kills Della to say no.

“The Dellas of the world are wonderful, loving people,” Brunstetter said. “I want Jen and Macy to be full human beings, and I want us to root for their love. But there are lots of plays and movies about Jen and Macy. There really aren’t very many about Della.”

Ratteray agreed. “I’m queer and I’m black, so of course I side with Macy,” she said. “But you definitely feel for Della, and I think it’s because Bekah wrote her with such incredible humanity and heart.”

The show grew out of the Echo Playwrights Lab, where aspiring playwrights, many of them already writing for TV shows, are required to produce 10 new pages of script a month.

Brunstetter, 35, is no newbie, having been frequently produced off-Broadway. For The Cake, she pulled from a variety of interests: her love for the BBC reality series The Great British Bake

Off (in the play, Della dreams of competing on a mythical American version of the show); her own impending wedding (she was married in the Blue Ridge Mountains in October); and Paula Deen, the disgraced former Food Network star.

“I’m fascinated by stories where somebody said this stupid thing, and then all of a sudden, we all hate them, they’re horrible people,” she said. “I always have sympathy for them, because I say stupid things all the time. I’m probably saying something stupid right now.”

The play was a way for Brunstetter to have a conversation with her parents about gay marriage without actually doing so.

“I’ve tried to talk to them about why I support gay marriage and why I support my gay friends, and those conversations never really go anywhere,” she said. “I’m horrible at arguments. But when I’m writing a scene, I get to say what I wish I had said.” Brunstetter is a lot like Jen, the lead character, which creates added challenges for Lucio.

“It’s not her biography we’re telling, but it’s very personal to her, so you want to get it right,” she said. “But on the other hand, it’s great, because I have a living, breathing human to watch and observe.”

Jennifer Chambers, the director, who worked with Brunstetter on the play from its earliest days at the Playwrights Lab, knew that she had a strong drama from the start.

“But I can’t tell you how many times we went, ‘I wonder if this is still relevant?’,” she said. “Because it really did feel like, culturally, we were moving away from this. And then Trump became president, and the show has taken on a whole other tone.”

Brunstetter has several more projects in the works, including her first full-length for Theater Breaking Through Barriers, in New York; and at the end of this month, Camp Wanatachi: In

Concert (she was a co-writer of the book) will be performed at the New York Musical Festival.

She’s also working on three new musicals. One is a piece with Karen O, the lead singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, called Hearts Beat So Loud; another is an R&B musical co-written by Cinco Paul (a writer of the Despicable Me series), about a young Mary Magdalene falling in love with a teenage Jesus.

“I’ve actually already written a few plays about Jesus as a teenager,” she said, “so I had some material all ready to go.” But The Cake, and cakes, will always hold a special place in her heart.

“I find cooking and baking so relaxing,” she said. Her dream — it’s actually a note on the final page of her script — is that there will be cake for audience members at the end of each performance. “It just really brings people together,” she said.

I’m horrible at arguments. But when I’m writing a scene, I get to say what I wish I had said