“The play often feels like it’s patting comfortably liberal NYC theatergoers on the back for trying to understand the white working class/the Bible Belt/the Trump voter, while wrapping that examination in a sunny comedy that comes awfully close to asserting a moral equivalence, or at least an equal level of absurdity, between believing homosexuality is a sin and not eating cake...Meadow’s direction is fairly static and uninspired."
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"The playwright makes Della a sympathetic character...The actress makes her a delight, with great comic timing...Della feels like the only fully believable character in the play, with the other three characters primarily serving the mechanics of the plot...The cast does what it can to charm us into accepting the characters as credible...There are some lovely moments in the play. If it has too many artificial ingredients, still 'The Cake' is undeniably sweet."
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"Too sweet for my palate in spite of its efforts to get to the underbelly of newsworthy headlines...Brunstetter is adept at punchy one-liners, but her deeper dive into the characters’ struggles with religion, race, and sexual orientation often feel overwrought rather than extensions of their life experiences. Even so, Rupp finds the humor and humility in the baker with existential questions about her faith...Given this choice between a squall or a sweet, I’d head into the superstorm."
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"More a good-natured, sit-com treatment of a serious situation than a dramatic take on the historic case that went to the Supreme Court…Some mild jokes about the different values of liberal Northerners and conservative Southerners provide icing, but the play's pursuit of laughter sometimes seems more urgent than anything much deeper…Rupp's pleasing presence as the conflicted baker-housewife provides what flavor this confection has."
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"The issue is dealt with in terms of relations between the characters involved, not as a political drama, and that gives it a fresh take...The baker is Della, played by Debra Jo Rupp in a luminous performance that is entertaining and ultimately emotionally critical to the plot and relationships...The play’s resolution makes for more potent drama and perspective than a rehash of the real-life legal battles might have been."
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"A first class production directed with great wit and humanity...Rupp gives a fantastic, full dimensional performance...The frustrating problem with 'The Cake,' though, is that Della doesn’t change much at all, or at least not nearly enough...As a gay audience member, I felt oddly othered by this play—a comedy—which, I suppose, isn’t aimed at me...Brunstetter’s flat and argumentative writing of these lesbians, though no doubt well-intentioned, is unconvincing and inauthentic."
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"It wraps a highly charged topic into a pleasant but sometimes gooey confection...The play’s most gripping moments come when Macy relates the experiences of her youth as a gay black woman...For the most part, though, Brunstetter’s writing has a soft-focus grace, with easy-to-take jokes and likable characters...In trying to give us both a thorny problem play and a feel-good entertainment, Brunstetter may be proving the old adage that you can’t have your cake and eat it, too."
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"In this very human look at a very politicized issue, Brunstetter makes little attempt to sway opinion. Instead she goes to great lengths to suggest it might be wise to consider this issue — and many like it — from multiple points of view...Though the play is a brisk 90 minutes, it bogs down at times with tedious, been there, done that arguments...It's Rupp who gives the production a reason for being...It's a beautifully nuanced, layered portrait of a woman in conflict with her own beliefs."
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