Executive Artistic Director Cynthia Fleming, Playwright Elaine Jarvik, & Director Marion Markham, Photo by Nick Fleming.

For more than a decade, playwright Elaine Jarvik has been asking big, uncomfortable, and often funny questions on Utah stages—about belief, identity, power, and the stories people tell themselves. With Sunny in the Dark, now receiving its world premiere at Salt Lake Acting Company, she turns that curiosity toward the cosmos.

Jarvik, a former journalist who spent decades as a feature writer before turning to playwriting, has built a body of theatrical work marked by curiosity, wit, and a persistent interest in how people construct meaning. Her plays often move easily between humor and discomfort, blending real-world questions with inventive theatrical frameworks. Sunny in the Dark continues that trajectory, centering on a 15-year-old girl wrestling with the biggest questions she can imagine.

Sunny, Jarvik explains, is “in the dark—literally and figuratively.” On the brink of 16, she wonders about the universe, about God, and—when a DNA test complicates her understanding of where she comes from—her own creation story. The play opens into a landscape of imagined possibilities, including a series of hypothetical fathers. One is an exuberant astrophysicist loosely inspired by Neil deGrasse Tyson and played by Matthew Ivan Bennett.

The questions driving the play—about belief, science, identity, and truth—reflect themes Jarvik has returned to throughout her theatrical career, from Four Women Talking About the Man Under the Sheet to Two Stories and (a man enters). The spark for Sunny in the Dark, Jarvik says, came from wondering whether public belief—particularly religious belief—still shapes cultural legitimacy, a line of thought that eventually expanded outward to the cosmos itself.

This production marks Jarvik’s fourth world premiere at SLAC, a relationship she credits to the company’s commitment to actor-driven, risk-taking new work. “They do a lot of brave new work,” she says, describing world premieres as acts of collective invention—starting with the script, then layering in performance, design, and imagination to make the world feel fully alive. “Writing is a solitary endeavor,” says Jarvik, “But theater is—thanks heavens —collaborative, and I’ve been so lucky to collaborate with a theater full of brilliant, imaginative people, who have taken my script and made it even more whimsical than I had ever dreamed of.”

Despite its provocative subject matter and nods to astrophysics, Jarvik hopes audiences come away with something simpler as well: enjoyment. Theatre, she says, should be a place to learn and to question—but also to have fun. With Sunny in the Dark, she’s once again inviting audiences to sit with uncertainty, curiosity, and wonder, and to enjoy the ride while they do.

Sunny in the Dark, Salt Lake Acting Company, Salt Lake City, February 4 – March 1, 2026.

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UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.