{"id":101459,"date":"2026-02-02T10:36:43","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T17:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=101459"},"modified":"2026-02-03T10:46:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T17:46:15","slug":"elaine-jarvik-turns-her-curiosity-to-the-cosmos-in-sunny-in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/elaine-jarvik-turns-her-curiosity-to-the-cosmos-in-sunny-in-the-dark\/","title":{"rendered":"Elaine Jarvik Turns Her Curiosity to the Cosmos in “Sunny in the Dark”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Executive Artistic Director Cynthia Fleming, Playwright Elaine Jarvik, & Director Marion Markham, Photo by Nick Fleming.<\/p><\/div>\n

For more than a decade, playwright Elaine Jarvik<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/a> has been asking big, uncomfortable, and often funny questions on Utah stages\u2014about belief, identity, power, and the stories people tell themselves. With Sunny in the Dark<\/em>, now receiving its world premiere at Salt Lake Acting Company<\/span><\/span><\/strong>, she turns that curiosity toward the cosmos.<\/h4>\n

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<\/em> continues that trajectory, centering on a 15-year-old girl wrestling with the biggest questions she can imagine.<\/h4>\n

Sunny, Jarvik explains, is \u201cin the dark\u2014literally and figuratively.\u201d On the brink of 16, she wonders about the universe, about God, and\u2014when a DNA test complicates her understanding of where she comes from\u2014her 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.<\/h4>\n

The questions driving the play\u2014about belief, science, identity, and truth\u2014reflect themes Jarvik has returned to throughout her theatrical career, from Four Women Talking About the Man Under the Sheet<\/em> to Two Stories and (a man enters)<\/em>. The spark for Sunny in the Dark<\/em>, Jarvik says, came from wondering whether public belief\u2014particularly religious belief\u2014still shapes cultural legitimacy, a line of thought that eventually expanded outward to the cosmos itself.<\/h4>\n

This production marks Jarvik\u2019s fourth world premiere at SLAC, a relationship she credits to the company\u2019s commitment to actor-driven, risk-taking new work. \u201cThey do a lot of brave new work,\u201d she says, describing world premieres as acts of collective invention\u2014starting with the script, then layering in performance, design, and imagination to make the world feel fully alive. \u201cWriting is a solitary endeavor,\u201d says Jarvik, \u201cBut theater is\u2014thanks heavens \u2014collaborative, and I\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/h4>\n

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\u2014but also to have fun. With Sunny in the Dark<\/em>, she\u2019s once again inviting audiences to sit with uncertainty, curiosity, and wonder, and to enjoy the ride while they do.<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sunny in the Dark<\/em>, Salt Lake Acting Company<\/a>, Salt Lake City, February 4 – March 1, 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For more than a decade, playwright Elaine Jarvik has been asking big, uncomfortable, and often funny questions on Utah stages\u2014about 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":101460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[2245,860],"class_list":["post-101459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theatre","tag-elaine-jarvik","tag-salt-lake-acting-company"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/image-1.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-04 08:32:08","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101459"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101461,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101459\/revisions\/101461"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}