Echaka Agba as Macy, Sam Rosenstrater as Della and Eileen Hanley as Jen in “The Cake” at Portland Stage. Photo by No Umbrella Media, LLC
Life, liberty and the pursuit of cake are again on the mind of Portland Stage as its season draws to a close.
After earlier this year presenting the world premiere of “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas,” a play that emphasizes immigrant assimilation and diversity issues while being centered around a bakery, the theater company is closing its 49th season with a work that mixes sweet wedding plans, souring relationships and some big cultural issues into a warmly entertaining 100 minutes of theater.
Bekah Brunstetter’s “The Cake” concerns Jen, a 30-something woman who returns to her North Carolina hometown in 2018 to plan her wedding to her fiancée, Macy. Given her history, Jen naturally wants 50-ish Della, her late mother’s best friend and a proud baker, to make the wedding cake. But things get complicated when the initially ecstatic Della realizes that it will be a gay marriage. That is something that “doesn’t sit right” with her religious beliefs.
Though it steps around the legal complexities of public accommodations law outlined in recent headlines (and in the printed program for the show), the play’s very personalized circumstances still may not suggest to some the makings of a friendly comedy. What makes the show pleasing, though, is that the characters, despite their differences, do not stay fixed within their cultural safe places. The thorny questions remain but the folks are at least relatively open and often quite funny in addressing them. And there is a bit of hope suggested by that.
Todd Brian Backus directs the four actors, emphasizing with the author what each character brings to the table.
Rosenstrater as Della. Photo by No Umbrella Media, LLC
Sam Rosentrater’s Della is a folksy local with aspirations to win a national baking contest. Rosentrater sympathetically conveys her sense of always wanting to “follow the directions,” both in cooking and in what she believes “God intended” a marriage to be. As the play goes deeper into her back story, her personal struggles with her own marriage emerge.
Raymond McAnally plays likeable good-old-boy husband Tim in some of the funniest scenes in the show, while also adding a touch of poignance in his romancing of Della.
Hanley and Agba as Jen and Macy. Photo by No Umbrella Media, LLC
Eileen Hanley plays Jen, a sweet but slightly naïve bride-to-be who’s caught between the values of her youth and her new identity. That she has remained wide-eyed while feeling some heavy undercurrents in her life makes her the one that brings out the best in the others. Hanley evinces the tender boundary testing of Jen well.
Echaka Agba gives her Macy the requisite edge of one who calls out the “bigot” she sees in Della. Macy establishes value “parameters” and sees Della’s Bible quoting as more a question of “metaphor” than moral dictate. But her love for Jen and the details of her own difficult life, which Agba projects with sincerity, make her more than just a liberal from “up there” in New York.
A rotating set by Germán Cárdenas Alaminos and subtle, character-defining costumes by Emily White, not to mention some enticing onstage confections, help make this play a thoroughly engrossing, entertaining and gently inspiring slice of theater from Portland Stage.
Steve Feeney is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.
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