Whenever the play allows Della’s contradictions to flower, it feels dramatic, raising usefully unanswerable questions. Is obedience to a homophobic faith itself homophobic? Can people’s antipathy to gay marriage be explained by defects in the traditional kind? In one provocative scene, Della tells her husband, Tim, who no longer makes love to her, that she has inherited the “very nudity of Eve,” thus connecting her refusal to participate in Jen’s happiness to her own sexual shame.
[What’s new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter.]
But Jen, too, suffers from sexual shame, as we learn in a parallel moment handled beautifully by Ms. Angelson. An amusing recollection of her first understandings of intercourse — she thought it involved hydraulics and an operating table — quickly turns horrifying.
The provisioning of each character with a clear-cut trauma to explain a current-day political stance does get tiresome though. And Ms. Brunstetter, a writer for NBC’s “This Is Us,” can’t help embroidering her argument with contrasting complications and comic behavior.
Tim (Dan Daily) is a cartoon Good Ol’ Boy, who doesn’t want to think about his wife’s problem “because it’s gross.” Jen seems more interested in fulfilling her childhood wedding dreams — she nearly hyperventilates over the fairy lights she finds at a craft store — than in honoring any of Macy’s own preferences. Macy herself (Marinda Anderson) is a Jezebel journalist and cake refusenik, earnestly if cluelessly informing Della that sugar is creating a “new generation of young Americans who are practically born with diabetes.”
Macy’s talking-pamphlet dialogue has been toned down since I saw “The Cake” at Barrington Stage Company last summer, and Ms. Anderson further warms Macy up with her charm. (It’s still a bit of a stretch that she and Jen tolerate each other, but less of one now.) And Ms. Rupp, the only holdover from the Barrington cast, has deepened her performance under Lynne Meadow’s direction, finding new ways to make Della sympathetic without making her saccharine.
But some changes are not improvements. A few added lines referencing the election of Donald J. Trump overeagerly underline the play’s political position, as if there were any doubt of it. And Ms. Brunstetter has doubled down on the surrealism of five interstitial scenes in which Della imagines herself on the baking show. Meant to ratchet up tension, they cheapen it instead.
That’s a problem built into the genre, which favors themes over credibility and pushes characters (and playwrights) into corners. Watching “The Cake” I sometimes thought of earlier problem plays like Robert Anderson’s “Tea and Sympathy” and movies like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” — not just because each suggests food in its title. These are stories that burnish the audience’s progressive credentials without really testing them against formidable opposition. And here, too, there is no doubt that Della is wrong.
