New play source of joy, healing, catharsis

By Shari Goldstein Stern

Patrons are having their cake and eating it too at the Dallas Theater Center’s (DTC) world premiere of “Cake Ladies,” running in repertory with “Tiny Beautiful Things” at the Dee and Charles Wyly Theater now through October 17. After an international pandemic rendered live theaters dark for more than a year, bringing them back would be a huge challenge. Kevin Moriarty, DTC director who is always up to a challenge, used it to kick off the 2021-22 season with a loud, bakeware bang.

At last Friday night’s production of the original piece, “Cake Ladies” by Dallas playwright Jonathan Norton, the audience, albeit small, was as enthusiastic as it was for Norton’s “penny candy” in 2019. Having made a loving name for himself in Dallas theater, Norton is DTC’s playwright-in-residence. 

From the moment Alex Organ as Nancy, a 65-ish proud mother, greets the “Cake Ladies” audience, Organ captivates patrons with the first of his three roles in the show within a show.

From an on-stage podium Nancy welcomes neighbors to the Cedar Oaks, Texas town’s first “AIDSFest!” Having survived the death of her son Mikey to AIDS, Nancy opens the event as a tribute to Mikey and others from the tight-knit town. During Nancy’s exaggerated welcome speech, a billboard with her son’s image hangs behind her, with an amazing likeness to Organ.

“Cake Ladies” is set at the Scott County Community Playhouse, the pride of Cedar Oaks. The small town is recovering from a drug-fueled HIV outbreak. The town is proud to present its own production of “Angels in America” as a tribute to the many townspeople affected by the gruesome epidemic. With the launch of their first ever “AIDSFest!” it seems the town is finally ready to heal.  

When the COVID-19 pandemic shuts down the playhouse, best friends LeAnne and Tweedy-Bird take charge to make sure “Angels in America” will, in fact, be a reality in their little home town. To be successful they must confront Cedar Oaks’ dark past and their own carefully buried secrets.

LeAnne (Sally Nystuen Vahle) and Tweedy-Bird (Liz Mikel) affectionately known as “the cake ladies” who drive a bakery truck selling cakes on wheels, are a delight playing off each other while obviously being the best kind of friends. They tell each other the truth, and they are hilarious in the process.

Tweedy-Bird is played as smoothly as only Liz Mikel can, following an actual foot injury during rehearsal that landed her in a wheel chair for performances. She steers the vehicle with aplomb. 

Also impressive, not many actors are capable of skillfully making their stage entrance in a hospital bed seem natural. 

No stranger to Dallas audiences, Mikel, a member of Dallas Theater Center’s Diane and Hal Brierley Resident Acting Company, has extensive credits, including: “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “Little Women,” “penny candy,” “Twelfth Night” and “Steel Magnolias,” to name a few. 

Vahle has enjoyed entertaining local audiences for 25 years. At DTC, she has been seen in “Little Women,” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “Sweat” and in “Steel Magnolias” as Ouiser Boudreaux, and many more roles. She received accolades as Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol.” She is co-founder of Dallas’ Kitchen Dog Theater, and the actor is associate professor of acting and voice in the University of North Texas Department of Theater. 

Vahle has a special sentiment for her “Angels in America” wings — the kind of affection you might have for a puppy.

The production is directed by Enloe/Rose Artistic Director Kevin Moriarty, who asked Norton to write a play during the pandemic that would feature members of the DTC’s Diane and Hal Brierley Resident Acting Company. ‘“Cake Ladies’ is the perfect way to celebrate the return of live theater at Dallas Theater Center,” said Moriarty. 

Norton’s work has been produced throughout the country in locations like Louisville, Alabama, the Black and Latino Playwrights Conference and regionally at Theatre Three, Dallas Theater Center, Bishop Arts Theatre Center, Kitchen Dog, Undermain, Soul Rep and more. 

His play “Mississippi Goddamn,” commissioned and produced by the South Dallas Cultural Center, was a finalist for the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award and won the 2016 M. Elizabeth Osborn Award given by the American Theatre Critics Association.

“Imagine me in the throes of writer’s block,” Norton said in an article he wrote in 2020. “I’d just accepted a DTC commission to write a full-length play based on a 20-minute digital play I [had written] about cake ladies and ‘Angels in America.’ I only had three months until the first draft was due and I had nothing.”

He said: “All I knew was that I was writing a comedy for Liz Mikel and Sally Nystuen Vahle, and that it would be in conversation with Tony Kushner’s epic play about the AIDS crisis, ‘Angels  in America,’ one of the most monumental and complex plays ever written. No pressure!” 

Norton explained that “Angels” was heavy in his spirit as news about COVID-19 started to intensify. “When the chance to write a play came around, ‘Angels’ quickly found its way from my pen to paper.”

The imaginative playwright continued: “Also, as a queer child of the 1980s, I vividly remember the AIDS outbreak. I remember the fear and how homosexuality was vilified.”

‘“Cake Ladies’ gives me the opportunity to explore those feelings. My hope for ‘Cake Ladies’ is that it can do for others what ‘Angels in America’ did and continues to do for me. I hope that it can offer a source of joy, healing and catharsis in difficult times.”

For information and ticket sales, visit dallastheatercenter.org/show/cake-ladies.