The Rhetorical Review

Salt Lake City, UT — Sunny in the Dark, a world-premiere production at Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC), pairs playwright Elaine Jarvik with director Marion Markham for a probing, intellectually restless new play. What initially appears to be a coming-of-age story about a curious teenager asking big questions soon unfolds into something far more ambitious—an exploration of how people search for meaning when truth is withheld, filtered, or strategically managed.

Moving between cosmology, family secrecy, school board politics, and belief systems that promise certainty, Jarvik’s script traces how origin stories—scientific, religious, and personal—shape not only who we think we are, but how we learn to live alongside what we cannot know. Centered on fifteen-year-old Sunny, the play intertwines the vastness of the universe with the intimate pressures of family and public life, asking what happens when the desire for answers collides with the reality of uncertainty.

Origins, Cosmology, and the Question of Beginnings

Sunny in the Dark opens with a monologue that deliberately overwhelms. Sunny speaks about the universe’s beginning—or lack of one—about emptiness filled with energy, about expansion accelerating faster and faster. The language is scientific, but the feeling is existential. Jarvik frames the question of origin not as wonder, but as unease: if you don’t know where something truly begins, you’re left with theories, myths, or stories you tell yourself just to cope.

“There’s always a backstory. And if you don’t know the real beginning, all you have are theories—or you make up stories.” —Sunny

What’s striking is how the monologue flirts with the biblical without committing to it. The audience is briefly led to ask: Is this a creation story? Is this a religious play? That uncertainty is intentional. Jarvik positions cosmology and theology as parallel human responses to the same discomfort—our inability to tolerate not knowing. The heaviness of the opening is not accidental; it sets the stakes. This is a play about beginnings that refuse to stay simple. That line quietly announces the play’s central concern: not the accuracy of origins, but the human need to make sense of them. Jarvik seems less interested in answering where the universe begins than in exposing how urgently humans want origins to feel stable and legible. The balance between abstraction and intimacy is characteristic of Jarvik’s voice as a playwright.

Sunny’s Search for Meaning

Sunny’s fixation on astrophysics quickly reveals itself as more than intellectual curiosity. Her repeated return to ideas like expansion, dark matter, and inaccessible origins mirrors her personal reality: a family history that is deliberately obscured. CoCo May Berwald plays Sunny with a sharp blend of adolescent humor and genuine anxiety, capturing how curiosity can become a survival strategy.

One of the play’s most effective moves is how it connects scientific language to emotional regulation. When Sunny explains that galaxies are moving farther away from each other, faster and faster, it doesn’t feel like trivia—it feels like a metaphor she’s using to name emotional distance. Science becomes a way to narrate loss without yet knowing what’s been lost.

When Sunny learns the truth about her conception, the play doesn’t treat the revelation as a tidy answer. Instead, it fractures her sense of self further. Jarvik resists the temptation to turn “the truth” into closure. Knowledge, here, destabilizes rather than heals, suggesting that the pursuit of truth is not inherently restorative.

Politics, Optics, and Performed Truth

Running alongside Sunny’s personal crisis is her mother Elise’s campaign for a local school board seat. Elise’s slogan—“a candidate you can trust”—lands with increasing irony as the play unfolds. Jarvik uses this phrase almost as a pressure test: what does trust mean when truth is filtered, delayed, or strategically withheld?

The campaign storyline smartly exposes how political language flattens complexity. Elise is repeatedly encouraged to be “vague,” to “clarify” only after damage is done, to shape belief rather than speak plainly. The play doesn’t paint Elise as malicious; instead, it shows how systems reward performance over vulnerability. Truth becomes something you manage, not something you live.

Director Marion Markham keeps these public and private worlds colliding, often quite literally, reinforcing how impossible it becomes for the family to protect intimacy once public narrative takes over.

Imaginary Father Figures and Theatrical Absurdity

One of the play’s most inventive theatrical devices is the appearance of Sunny’s imagined father figures. These characters externalize her internal search, giving form to the stories she constructs when information is withheld.

The scientist—or more specifically, the astrophysicist—figure, played with exuberant physicality by Matthew Ivan Bennett, becomes especially memorable. Swinging in and out of scenes via a black, astrology-adorned hanging hoop, he feels less like a character than a living metaphor—half authority, half fantasy. His entrances are consistently hilarious, but the humor is purposeful: he offers answers without certainty, explanations without emotional risk.

Blowing bubbles, jumping erratically, and offering oversized gestures, Bennett transforms dense cosmological concepts into something playful and absurd. The laughter he generates is crucial. It interrupts the play’s anxiety spiral just long enough for the audience to breathe, reminding us that learning can be stimulating—even fun—and that the unknown need not be feared.

That playfulness is reinforced by Jessica Graham’s prop design, particularly through the use of books, bubbles, and other simple, tactile objects. These props render cosmology physical and fleeting—brief moments of wonder that appear, float, and disappear. The effect is both comic and quietly resonant, underscoring how explanation in this play remains provisional rather than authoritative. Where Sunny’s imagined figures offer elasticity, humor, and temporary relief, the next voices that enter her story arrive with certainty—and consequence.

Faith, Ethics, and Outside Voices

As Sunny’s understanding of her origins collapses, the play introduces external ideological voices—most notably through a Catholic priest, played by Jason Andrew Hackney, in a cameo marked by sharp timing, a pronounced Scottish accent, and authoritative unease. The performance is funny, yes, but also unsettling. The priest doesn’t resolve anything; he adds weight.

This moment captures one of the play’s sharpest insights: when people are vulnerable, belief systems rush in to claim authority. Faith, science, law, and morality all speak at once, competing to define what Sunny’s existence means. Jarvik doesn’t privilege one voice over another. Instead, she lets the cacophony stand, mirroring the confusion of adolescence itself.

In this way, the priest’s appearance reframes earlier moments of playful speculation, transforming uncertainty from something Sunny explores on her own terms into something others are suddenly eager to define for her.

Performances

It’s worth noting how strong and cohesive the ensemble is in Sunny in the Dark, a play that depends on tonal precision and emotional range from every performer. CoCo May Berwald anchors the production as Sunny, bringing clarity, curiosity, humor, and vulnerability to the character, giving it both intellectual sharpness and genuine teenage uncertainty. Matthew Ivan Bennett brings buoyant physicality and comic intelligence to one of the play’s most exuberant imagined figures, the astrophysicist, offering levity without undermining the stakes. Jason Andrew Hackney, who plays several roles throughout the production—including a musician, a hippie astrologist early on, and a Catholic priest—is especially memorable in the latter, delivering the cameo with sharp timing, a pronounced accent, and destabilizing energy that heightens the play’s ethical tension. Paul Mulder is genuinely heartwarming as Sunny’s stepfather, grounding the play with quiet compassion and steady presence. Micki Martinez, as Elise’s campaign agent AJ, brings sharp focus and relentless momentum to the role, embodying the invasive logic of political strategy that repeatedly collides with the family’s private life. Alexandra Harbold brings measured restraint to Elise, allowing the character’s political calculation and maternal fear to coexist without flattening either.

Set, Design, and the Language of the Cosmos

The design work in Sunny in the Dark does significant narrative labor. Set design by Gage Williams—particularly the swinging celestial entrance—functions as both portal and punctuation, marking moments when the play leaves realism and enters metaphor.

Spencer Potter’s costume design similarly helps distinguish between grounded reality and heightened metaphor, particularly in the play’s imagined and explanatory figures.

The final scene is where design and theme align most powerfully. James Padilla’s lighting design, paired with galaxy projections, floods the stage with motion and color, transforming the space into a living cosmos. Disco lights refract across the stage, not as spectacle for its own sake, but as an embodied shift in the play’s emotional register.

Where the Play Stretches

The play’s ambition is also its risk. Jarvik reaches for science, religion, politics, social media, reproductive ethics, and family trauma—sometimes all in the same breath. There are moments when the accumulation feels heavy, when the play seems to be holding too many conversations at once. That density can briefly flatten the emotional throughline, especially when new ideas arrive before earlier ones have fully settled. Still, what ultimately resonates is how Jarvik holds these conversations in tandem, resisting the urge to privilege one framework over another.

The campaign manager, AJ’s constant intrusion into intimate family moments heightens dramatic tension but occasionally strains realism. The exaggeration serves a thematic purpose—illustrating how political machinery consumes private life once granted access—but it can momentarily pull focus from Sunny’s interior journey and feel somewhat unrealistic.

Every Shining Thing

In the end, Sunny in the Dark does not argue for belief, certainty, or closure. Instead, it suggests that meaning is something we choose how to hold. Sunny’s final turn toward the stars is not about answers, but attention—about deciding what to focus on when certainty remains out of reach.

What the play ultimately suggests is not that answers are possible, but that orientation is. Sunny may never locate a definitive beginning, but she can choose where to look next, understanding that no single answer will work for everyone.

When Sunny speaks of “every shining thing,” the line lands not as sentimentality, but as survival. After ninety minutes of spiraling questions, the play offers something more humane: permission to live without full knowledge, and still find beauty.

Show Information

Box office: (801) 363-7522

Tickets:

• Weekday & Sunday matinee/evening performances: about $35
• Friday & Saturday evening performances: about $45
• 30 & under discount: $20
• Student discount: $15
• Accessibility Performances
• Open Captioned Performance: Sunday, February 22 at 6 PM
• Audio Described Performance: Sunday, March 1 at 6 PM
• Sensory Friendly Performance: Saturday, February 28 at 2 PM
• ASL Interpreted Performance: Saturday, February 28 at 2 PM
• *Must present valid student ID (for student discount) or ID with date of birth (for 30/Under discount). Not available online, please contact the Box Office–(801) 363-7522

Cast

Matthew Ivan Bennett, CoCo May Berwald, Jason Andrew Hackney, Alexandra Harbold*, Micki Martinez*, Paul Mulder*

Creative Team

Marion Markham (Director), Gage Williams** (Set Designer), James Padilla (Lighting Designer), Spencer Potter (Costume Designer), Jennifer Jackson (Sound Designer), Jessica Graham (Props Designer), Calvin Vinson (Assistant Sound Designer), Adriana Lemke (Intimacy Director), Bridgette Lehman* (Production Manager/Stage Manager), Tahra Veasley* (Assistant Stage Manager)

*Member of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States
**Represented by United Scenic Artists Local USA 829 (IATSE)