The Stagecrafters Theater opened its new season with a timely production of Bekah Brunstetter’s 2017 drama “The Cake.” Jen (Noelle McLeer) is engaged to be married and travels to Winston, North Carolina, to meet Della (Jen Allegra), a baker who was her deceased mother’s best friend. The mother always dreamed Jen would enjoy a sumptuous wedding. To honor her wishes, Jen asks Della to bake the wedding cake.

Jen is full of trepidation and the play’s opening scene feels like the first round of a boxing match. Jen circles Della, searching for a chance to land the big blow: her fiancee, Macy (Britt Fauzer), is a Black woman. When Jen makes matters clear, Della backs out of a cake commitment with the excuse that her October schedule is packed.

Brunstetter was inspired to write “The Cake” after seeing news reports about a legal challenge from a baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay marriage. (In “Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission,” the Supreme Court sided 7-2 with the baker on narrow religious grounds.)

We come to know the characters principally by the positions they take on the sanctification of gay marriage. They are in a static state of argument, and some of what they say feels didactic. The play’s dramatic tension emerges in the impact these arguments will have on relationships and whether anyone will change their point of view.

Debates in “The Cake” place the onus on director Jane Toczek and her cast to make the characters engaging. As baker Della, Allegra expresses an authentic distress. Her dustup with Jen and Macy forces Della to face up to problems in her own marriage. Patrick Martin plays Della’s husband Tim, who accents his wife’s anguish by compartmentalizing relationship issues with a casual, jolly aura.

Brunstetter lightens the mood by introducing scenes from a fictional television show, “The Big American Bake-Off.” At first, Della travels to Broadway to compete on a lark. Later, these scenes turn funny in a phantasmagoric way when a moderator’s voice becomes sexual and abusive, mirroring Della’s marital distress.

Does anyone change? While Della mellows a bit on the subject of gay marriage, the significant change is that she and Tim mature in their marriage. McLeer’s Jen discards her tentative bearing, and when forced to choose, grows assertive. But Macy does not change at all, and Fauzer is expressive in her confident, demanding body language.

To change is to admit wrongdoing, or at least that something’s lacking. But Macy declares she is “right” from beginning to end, with angry eyes as if seeking revenge. The quiet irony of “The Cake” is that the character who probably speaks the most for playwright Brunstetter comes across as the least likable.

“The Cake,” through Sept. 28 at The Stagecrafters Theater, 8130 Germantown Ave. For tickets or more information, contact 215-247-8881 or thestagecrafters.org.