For each equal-intercourse wedding cake case that makes its way to the U.S. (or some other) Supreme Court, there have to be dozens of others that might be contested in the hearts of person betrothed and bakers.
Those are quieter, more nuanced courtrooms where proof is weighed in terms extra vibrant and cultural, as opposed to legalistic. It can get messy in approaches which might be, by turns, comedian or coronary heart-rending. And such cases can pose knotty, open-ended questions of faith, love, intuition, empathy, and tolerance with ramifications far beyond the ambit of gender-identification or celebration-making plans.
We’re plunged into the thick of this sort of case in The Cake, a trim and attractive production that concludes Pacific Theatre’s 2018-19 season. Bekah Brunstetter sets her clever, brisk script in her native Winston-Salem, North Carolina, far from her adopted California home. She plies her alternate as a TV author.
So she’s fluent sufficient in all the shibboleths of our Left Coast, multi-cultural, Libtard, hypo-allergenic culture. But she also has manner more excellent first-hand information and sympathy than lots of us for the true-believing evangelical denizens of Dixie’s Deploristan. That permits her to serve up to four rounded and sympathetic characters, all of whom we will root for, particular even though they will be from each other in history and orientation. The tale revolves around Della (Erla Faye Forsyth)
A by means of-the-book baker whose perfectionism maintains her cake store invariably in the purple but has earned her a contestant slot in an approaching spherical of a Bake-Off fact TV show. Tim, her stoutly dependable husband (Tim Dixon) covers the bakery’s losses together with his income as a plumber, whilst presiding as her moral and theological arbiter in step with his Biblically-ordained duty. Childless, the couple has implicitly adopted a virtual daughter, Jen (Stephanie Elgersma), the child of Della’s overdue exceptional pal.
