After three years of working on NBC’s hit series “This Is Us,” writer and producer Bekah Brunstetter is bringing two plays to the NYC stage this year: “The Cake” is now appearing at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and “Public Servant” will be presented by Theater Breaking Through Barriers in May on Theater Row.
Based on a real Colorado anti-discrimination case, “The Cake” centers on Della, a southern conservative baker who must reconcile her Bible-based beliefs when her friend’s daughter asks her to bake a cake for her upcoming marriage to a woman.
We talked to Brunstetter about the success and relevance of “The Cake,” her experiences in TV, and her work with The Kilroys, an independent, LA-based group of female playwrights and producers that she helped found.
“The Cake” is playing at the Manhattan Theatre Club until March 31.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
W&H: You’re wrapping up your work on “This Is Us.” What has that experience been like for you?
BB: I actually just left the show. I did three seasons, which is a typical writer’s contract. It was really hard to leave the show, but I got all these amazing opportunities to work on my own work right now and decided to take a leap of faith.
It’s been a fantastic experience, as we are a mostly female writers room. One of the writers is getting married over hiatus; one is having a bachelorette party soon. They’re all like family. We see each other every day and we know each other so intimately, particularly on a show like this where we’re talking about our childhood, our relationships, our losses.
These friendships are very intense, but I’m really excited to work on my own projects.
W&H: Did you bring a lot of experiences from your real life into your writing for the series?
BB: When you’re in the writing room, it’s all about the show. It’s not about you. You can’t force what you’ve been through in real life into the show. Sometimes it organically fits, sometimes it doesn’t. I was very overweight when I was young, so I really identified with Kate, especially as a child. So I was able to really give a real specificity to her stories.
I also have three brothers, so I’ve spoken a lot in the writers room about that specific sort of love. I’m fortunate that my parents are still alive, but we did have writers who had lost their parents.
We’re all contributing where we can, and if we hadn’t lived that life experience we’re writing about, we’re doing our best to see how it would feel if it happened to us.
W&H: What has your experience been like as far as being able to get the kinds of work made and being taken seriously as a female writer and producer in Hollywood?
BB: I’ve been really fortunate. My first long TV writing job, “Switched at Birth,” was run by a woman, Lizzy Weiss, and there were mostly women on the writing staff. On “This Is Us,” there were a lot of women in the writers room. So, in a lot of ways, I’ve had a good experience.
Of course, there are passing comments in the writers room like, “We had to hire you because we needed a woman.” Then you feel shitty. That’s still common rhetoric. But by the time I started working in TV, there was a lot of interest in telling women and people of color’s stories.
I feel lucky that I entered this business at the right time. Having heard horror stories from fellow TV writers, I think I’ve had it pretty good.
W&H: And how about in the theater world?
BB: When I first got to LA, I helped form The Kilroys, an activist group promoting gender parity in the theater. We release a blacklist every year of unproduced plays by women and women of color. We work hand in hand with Hollywood because we are all out here as producers and playwrights.
No one can ever say there aren’t any shows or plays by women. I’m more concerned about gender parity and want to be sure that women’s scripts are being read.
W&H: What has the journey been like since you started workshopping “The Cake” in LA?
BB: I got involved with the Echo Theater in Los Angeles. I created “The Cake” in that writers’ group in 2016. It has had a unique and wonderful path in the sense that I wrote it with Echo, and then they produced it.
While we were in rehearsals, the Supreme Court announced they were going to hear the Colorado case, and the play was thrust into the news in a new way. I ended up with a play that was incredibly timely. It’s gotten a lot of love all over the country. It’s kind of been insane because I’ve never had this much attention for any of my plays before in my entire writing career.
W&H: What is your working relationship like with Lynne Meadow, Manhattan Theatre Club’s artistic director?
BB: I keep calling Lynne the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of theater. She’s incredible. She went to Yale’s Directing Program in the 1970s and was the first woman to ever go through that program. She’s been running MTC since she was 25 or something. Lynne knows how to create a production that carries an audience through a story.
I went straight to New York for grad school after college and I was in New York for nine years doing theater. I’d go see plays at MTC and longed to one day have a play there. But I never really knew her until she decided to produce my play.
Lynne loves “The Cake” more than I do! It’s crazy. She’s so committed and so invested in it.
W&H: How did you get inside Della’s head and manage to make the character change within the 90-minute play?
BB: Della is very much a conglomeration of a lot of women that I’ve known and observed in my life. I tried to imagine what it was like in her home and why she believed what she believed.
It’s easy for people like her to feel how they feel about same-sex marriages. They don’t have any gay people in their lives who they love. I wanted to explore what happens when someone she loves deeply brings home a woman.
I believe once that situation is in your world, you can’t push it aside. I didn’t want her to just change all of a sudden. I was trying to focus on the small change. For Della, it was needing to make the cake because for her it was the right thing to do.
W&H: I read that your parents partially inspired the story behind “The Cake.” Have they seen it yet and if so what do they think of it?
BB: My parents first saw it in 2017 in a theater in North Carolina. That experience was intense because it was happening where I grew up, and it was a big flashy production. It was an overwhelming experience for all of us. Then my parents came to my opening in New York, and the play really communicated with them like I intended to. It was my favorite experience in my career as a playwright ever.
They not only felt honored that the play was written for them, but it also made them consider my point of view. I was in tears. I’m still processing the fact that the reason I wrote the play has found its way to my parents because I wrote it for them. I had to get this play out of my system, and it’s really moving to have shared it with them.
W&H: You’re also working on a musical version of “The Notebook” with Ingrid Michaelson. Where are you in the process and what else are you working on?
BB: We’re in the middle working on “The Notebook.” We’re trying to nail down the director and finish our first draft.
“The Public Servant” is a play about my dad as a county commissioner when he worked in politics. [That’s coming to the stage in May.] I’m also working on a movie adaptation of “The Cake,” and I’m working on a couple of my own TV shows.
