Portland Stage Presents THE CAKE This April

Portland Stage Company will bring The Cake to Maine. A play as delicious as it is relevant, as comical as it is intentional, The Cake is sure to delight audiences.

Written by award-winning writer Bekah Brunstetter, (NBC's This Is Us, Starz's American Gods, and plays Be A Good Little Widow, F*cking Art, Going to a Place Where You Already Are to name a few), The Cake is an important yet funny look at love, beliefs, traditions, relationships, and confection. This play has sold out in multiple venues and has been hailed as "refreshing and heartening" by the LA Times. With characters that are human, layered, and true and a story that asks us all to evaluate our beliefs and our capacity to love, The Cake lands with thoughtful, intentional sweetness

The Cake centers on queer characters getting married in the south and the challenges faced when rigidly held beliefs do not align with the realities of loving others. On the surface is a wedding cake and a queer wedding, a story our country knows. More deeply is the story of the very real, very relatable characters who reckon with who they are in a divided and unfamiliar world when loving relationships hang in the balance.

Director Todd Backus, who is also the Literary Manager at Portland Stage, says, "This is a play we had been thinking about several years ago when it originally premiered. We originally announced it in the 2020-2021 season, and honestly at the time I was worried that we had maybe moved past this play a little bit... It seemed that maybe this [topic] would be out of date, but now we have a case that is very similar to Masterpiece Cake Shop that is going through the courts right now that makes this [play] incredibly relevant right now. I am excited to bring this conversation to audiences here in Portland."

Eileen Hanley,* who plays Jen, is a Portland native returning to play a gay woman as an out gay woman herself. "It's very cathartic... it's very meta for me." She adds, "I find it interesting that we are able to present these people as their multi-leveled selves and see all the sides of them that are good and bad, and let the audience find themselves in parts of all those characters. They'll have something to connect to and reflect on."