Understudying a lead role in a play usually means cheekily dreaming that something terrible will happen. Not too terrible, just sufficiently terrible that you get your unexpected shot and a star is born.
But me, I’m terrified. I want to throw away my shot.
My fear is not that the actor I’m shadowing right now is onstage the whole time, or that she has to convincingly age more than 80 years in 100 minutes, or that she experiences that lifetime’s worth of emotional milestones in the same compressed timeline. Not afraid of that.
I’m scared of the cake.
Yes, a cake, the literal figurative idiomatic embodiment of an easy thing to make. One of the few things just about everyone has cooked on their own. Classic. Unintimidating. Unless you have to make that cake, from scratch, for the first time, in front of 150 people, while doing actor stuff, too.
The play is “Birthday Candles,” and it is running until Dec. 28 at 1st Stage in Tysons, Virginia. Each show, the character I understudy mixes the ingredients and bakes a cake from start to finish in an onstage oven, all in front of the audience, most of whom have made a cake and can judge from experience.
Baking her own birthday cake is a ritual for the character. As the recipe progresses, so does her life, skipping to the same time the following year when she’s making the cake again. It’s very cool and theatery, all of it happening in the room with you. Watching someone bake is intimate and revealing. In the audience, you actually smell the magic. And maybe the fear. So much can go wrong.
So. Much. Can go wrong.
A play is a promise to the audience. The team says, we, talented people, have worked on this and done our best to smooth out the kinks. Probably the set won’t fall on anyone; probably the lines will be right. That “probably” is a risk and a reward that a movie audience doesn’t get. Like the difference between a cake someone bakes for you and one you get at a store.
We are people, not pixels, and the unexpected is going to happen. In this case, the unexpected is going to happen with a pan heated to 350 degrees. And raw eggs. Which can go splat.
Why is the cake so hard? Because it’s happening at the same time as everything else. Imagine your next two-hour work project — performing foot surgery, debugging software, defending your thesis — had a simultaneous bake-a-cake requirement. No extra time.
Theater is subtle. Success can be subjective. This cake is merciless and inarguable in a way theater usually isn’t. Pass/fail. Yes/no. Cake/no cake.
Deidra LaWan Starnes, an actor so chameleonlike I swear she’s a different height in every show I’ve seen her in, is doing the whole thing so I don’t have to. She started mixing the ingredients in rehearsals about two weeks before opening. In tech rehearsal, you do some moments over and over and some not at all, resulting in some ingredients added over and over and some not at all. After a few hours of work under the lights, she announced the batter “looks like chitterlings.”
Hours later, with a wince, “pumpkin seeds.”
The first baking came out too lumpy, and the team discovered that the old-timey recipes are right. When you don’t have a mixer, the dry ingredients and wet ingredients need to combine separately; to cream is the decorous old verb. The second cake was too wet and wasn’t set by the time the play needs it to come out of the oven. We learned the same way the character learns. Repetition. Ritual.
And trying to imagine what will go wrong. Sarah Usary, the stage manager, microwaves the sticks of butter precisely before each run, pulling the wrapping almost all the way off so it’s easier when the actor has to do it. She debated having a fake egg — the company has a stock of prop eggs — in the carton for the moment someone tosses an egg into the air. Is it better, should the unexpected happen, to have a realistic dropped egg mess or for the fake egg to bounce, ruining the realism? I won’t tell you what she decided. Nor will I tell you who gets to eat the cake in the end.
It’ll all look like second nature by the time you see it. I mean, I hope so, because that’ll mean it won’t be me up there.
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