Ten years ago, Elaine Jarvik’s science fiction play Based on a True Story (in a Plan-B Theatre world premiere production) took its audiences to 2046, where commercial time travel is an option on the P-F highway (past-future) which stretches 15 billion years in either direction. There are time refugee centers for persons whose trips trap or leave them in unexpected points where counselors guide lost individuals through the “This Is Your New Now” reorientation. There is a woman pope, rights for stemlings as articulated in the Tuscaloosa Protocol, and the terms of ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ for married couples are now obsolete.
That play was inspired, in part, by Charles Yu’s 2010 novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon). Yu’s novel, with the sort of meta-narrative possibilities that make good science fiction about time travel, chronicles an engineer who repairs time machines and encounters a future version of himself and accidentally kills him. Yu’s quirky writing percolated with a lot of pop culture along with the intellectually demanding material that sits well with science nerds and tech geeks without letting fantasy override the essential emotional arc of good storytelling.
In her latest theatrical exploration of big cosmological questions, Sunny in the Dark, a delightful comedy-drama, Jarvik places it into familiar contemporary territory. In a prepared statement, she explained the play was sparked by “a question I’ve wondered about for a while; does a presidential candidate need to be religious (even if that candidate seemed to be faking it) in order to win? And that got me thinking about not just belief, but about the cosmos, which got me thinking about the origin of, well, everything.”
The play is in the middle of a world premiere production run, directed by Marion Markham, at Salt Lake Acting Company. The results are excellent, as the actors infuse their performances with the sensitive intellectual undercurrents which form this play. This is the fourth Jarvik play that SLAC has produced in the last 15 years.
Exploring these questions falls to Sunny, 15, who is intrigued not only by the origins of the universe but also the circumstances of her own birth. In Based on a True Story, the two lead characters have been unable to conceive a child, which creates an emotional, melancholic gap in their marriage. In Sunny in the Dark, Jarvik expands these emotional dimensions, as she focuses on fertility and the connections to doubts and faith. “I have many friends who have struggled with fertility, and their stories have stuck with me,” she explained in a 2016 interview.
Photo: Nick Fleming.
Jarvik blends realistic and fantastical characters in this latest work. Sunny (played smartly by CoCo May Berwald) loves her family: Elise, her middle-age mother (played just as intelligently by Alexandra Harbold) and Tom, her step-father (Paul Mulder hits the right tone). In the play’s opening monologue, Sunny says, “Because if you don’t know the real beginning, all you have is theories. Or you make up stories. We make stuff up to make ourselves feel better. But then we don’t feel better. We feel confused.”
Sunny is becoming more frustrated, wondering why she cannot get complete answers about her own creation. Her friend finds it equally hard to believe that Sunny’s mother says that the story about who her father is is too complicated to explain. Her friend says “that’s totally messed up,” especially if Sunny’s mother cannot remember his name as if he was a character in an epic Russian novel.
Meanwhile, Elise is running for a seat on the school board, essentially on a platform that “someone has to stand up to the people who think public school teachers are dangerous.” Sunny’s family is progressive and enlightened. Sunny can wear her nose ring without protests. However, Elise’s enlightened attitudes concern AJ (a solidly credible portrayal by Micki Martinez), who is managing Elise’s campaign. AJ worries that some voters will believe that Elise has “no rules in her home” and that the family doesn’t look wholesome. In the fight to protect and preserve freedoms in representative democracy, school boards remain the most important political unit in that challenge.
With the school board campaign consuming everyone’s mind and energy, Sunny finds refuge in several fantastical characters she encounters in her cosmological quest. These include a priest, dad and man (small roles juggled nicely by Jason Andrew Hackney) and then there is The Astrophysicist (close to but not exactly like the eccentric Dr. Emmett Brown in the Back to the Future franchise, and rendered marvelously by Matthew Ivan Bennett).
In the midst of his eccentric nerdy zaniness, the astrophysicist guides Sunny in her intellectual coming-of-age. He suggests that Sunny should not shy away from taking bold steps in conceiving new paths to answer questions, especially whenever she reaches a dead end. As for exploring faith, one of the play’s most insightful aspects, adorned with plenty of clever humor, surrounds the questions of atheism and doubt.
When Sunny mentions that her family started going to church after her mother married her stepfather, the astrophysicist is surprised to hear Sunny say, “I liked when the pastor said ‘God is a loving parent.’” Later, the astrophysicist, who says that he finds more comfort in a Sunday brunch serving of Eggs Benedict and the pillars of rationality, and the priest go back and forth, after Sunny sadly exclaims that her creation meant that “I’m a leftover. A random afterthought!” The astrophysicist cannot abide the priest’s idea of the narcissistic anthropomorphism about the constructed image of God.
The actors handle the material very well. Harbold, an active director, producer and professor in theater, is genuinely sincere as Elise. Bennett, a playwright who most recently collaborated with Jarvik in writing Just Add Water that saw its Plan-B Theatre world premiere last fall, telegraphs the edifying layers of his character’s intellectual musings. Their cumulative presence clears the path effectively for the remainder of the ensemble to blossom in their roles— notably Sunny, who makes her SLAC debut.
The run continues through March 1. For tickets and more information, see the Salt Lake Acting Company website.
We saw the Sunny in the Dark Friday night and it was very entertaining and thought provoking. The cast was outstanding and writing highly intelligent.