‘The Cake’ offers more than a simple sugar high
Play touches on political issues but remains focused on humor
Della and Tim, the married couple in Bekah Brunstetter’s “The Cake,” at the Alley Theatre through July 1, bears more than a superficial resemblance to the TV couple, Roseanne and Dan Connor.
Lying on their bed watching TV (the Connors, on the other hand, prefer the couch), they’re so accustomed to each other’s smells and sounds they hardly notice the other one grunt. Della, though, notices her husband’s farts. Like the central couple in the classic TV series “Roseanne,” Della and Tim are lovable in their Wonder Bread existence.
The younger, queerer, more radical characters that surround Della and Tim are fiery, sure, and maybe more “relevant” in this world of lightspeed outrage. But it’s this older couple, cuddled against each other’s bumps and curves, who are the stars. They’ve lain in bed so long they’ve become bedrocks. And bedrocks are the key to a successful television sitcom.
The central conflict in “The Cake,” whose tone oscillates between sitcom and issue play, begins when a family friend asks Della to bake a cake for a gay wedding. This conflicts with Della’s religious views. Later in the play, when those views impact the North Carolina baker’s career, I thought to myself, “She just got Roseanned.” But make no mistake, Della is kin to Roseanne Connor, not Roseanne Barr. In other words, there’s nothing nasty about Della, a subtle and surprisingly understated fictional creation by Brunstetter and actor Julia Gibson that will no doubt remind you of someone you know — perhaps someone you’ve fought with, given up on or continue to love.
Nor is there anything unpalatable about “The Cake,” which touches on sensitive political issues but remains focused on what people want when they go out to see some entertainment — humor, personality and a light touch.
The more obvious comparison, of course, isn’t “Roseanne” but the Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court case that dominated a portion of this week’s news cycle. Like the court case, the primary question in “The Cake” is how we feel about a baker who doesn’t feel comfortable with making a cake for a gay wedding because it conflicts with personal beliefs. Unlike the court case, this play doesn’t punt on the gay marriage issue ( Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion focused on a criticism of how Colorado treated the baker’s religious beliefs, without making specific statements on gay rights).
Jen is one of Della’s closest family friends. Played by Elizabeth Stahlmann, this young woman, who grew up in a conservative family in North Carolina and moved to Brooklyn, traded Bible camps and shame for kale, yoga, open love and, well, still some lingering shame. I suspect Jen is the most identifiable character for a Texas theater audience, which is by definition one that has straddled conservative and liberal America.
Jen is not Macy, her fiancé. Macy writes hard-hitting feminist thinkpieces for Slate, Huffington Post and Jezebel. She despises Big Sugar, believes religion is backwards and is proud to defend her blackness and queerness to the people most uncomfortable with those identities. Her tough conversational style and intellectual fury is halfway between the exceptional cultural critic and New Yorker staff writer Doreen St. Félix and the #MeToo bandwagon writers at Babe.net.
Candice D’Meza, the sole local actor in the cast, fuels most of the fire as Macy. D’Meza starts off speaking in a condescending tone, slyly showing her growing internal anger that explodes at just the right time. When a scene lingers on a slow moment, she pushes the room forward with a speed and precision that makes everyone in the room tense. “The Cake” knows that hitting hard is only one ingredient in the recipe for an issue play — important, but not to be overused. Whenever the play does go for the gut, though, it’s D’Meza throwing the punch.
Again, Jen is not Macy. Jen was raised to be kind — to love and to please all those around her. She wears an exasperated face, betraying a tiredness that even the gentlest smile cannot hide. She is also the prototypical moderate liberal, an equal but opposite political entity to Della’s moderate conservatism. Both have grown weary playing the diplomat. They aren’t willing, however, to give up who they are.
I wish Brunstetter focused even more on Jen and Della’s relationship. They’re a more interesting duo than the old married couple who want to reignite their sex life, or the soon-to-be-married couple who might be getting cold feet.
Those are well-worn paths in drama. Less explored is the problem of how a liberal millennial and a conservative boomer/Gen Xer can still love each other today. Della’s husband thinks homosexuality is unnatural. Jen’s fiancé thinks Christian Southerners are bigots. Della and Jen are the two ambassadors walking on the broken bridge, tip-toeing toward the gaping hole in the middle, trying not to look down.
It’s the pain and beauty of this little attempt at connection, which nowadays rarely feels worth the effort, that makes “The Cake” compelling — not narrative confections like the literally sweet final scene. Here, the Alley Theatre and director Jackson Gay are keen in presenting a contemporary rebranding of American hopelessness. An even sharper focus on this visceral, helpless feeling we all have could make this good drama great.