There is a moment in ‘Di Esperienza’, Plan-B Theatre’s world premiere production, when Leonardo da Vinci is challenged to explain his procrastination – and unwillingness – to complete the sky on a painting. For Leonardo, who wrote in his famed notebooks about the difficult, elusive subject of imaging the sky, the sky’s resistance to geometric measure demanded a broader contemplation of the cosmos.

Students of art history know that Leonardo invented aerial perspective. In the Codex Urbanos Latinus, he wrote: “You will paint the clouds pursued by impetuous winds, beaten against the crests of the mountains and enveloped among them, whirling about like waves dashed on the rocks, with the air itself terrifying because of the dark shadows created in the air by dust, mist and thick cloud.”

Many artists are preoccupied with imagery’s possibilities rather than mere description alone and that provides the creative impetus to work. Like the sky, the medium of painting, constrained in representation by the ever-seductive tyranny of image, comprises an enigma in which artists acknowledge there never is a single justification to the act of painting. For Leonardo, even his actions of uncertainty and hesitancy were ironical choices as he wrestled within the rhetoric of painting to fight for cosmological meaning and to avoid aesthetic cliché and dogma in technique.

Playwright Matthew Ivan Bennett’s extraordinary experiment in ‘Di Esperienza’ applies superbly the multifarious, temporal levels upon which painting operates while stitching together a research-enriched, open-ended framework of the subjectivities, representation modes, and narratives that comprise Leonardo’s fragmented and mythologized biography.

In his theatrical prose – poetic, expressive, tinged with gnostic metaphors and characteristically elegant feminine constructs of texts – Bennett fashions an exemplary work of the fantastic where the core uncertainty associated with illusionistic representations is experienced simultaneously by Leonardo on stage and by the audience.

The script brings to life figures from three of Leonardo’s most iconic – and unfinished – masterpieces. They are La Gioconda (a/k/a The Mona Lisa), Judas Iscariot from the Last Supper (which actually was da Vinci’s take on earlier versions of Andrea del Castagno and Domenico Ghirlandaio), and Isabella d’Este (often called the first lady of the Renaissance who was featured in a portrait drawing). These iconic figures become narrators – defying conventional time-space dimensions – to deconstruct the demigod and to begin revealing a man with whose emotional peaks and valleys ordinary beings, normally transfixed and confused by the dictates of an unsustainable paradigm of perfectionism, can comprehend and appreciate.

And, the production, directed by Jerry Rapier, does solid justice to Bennett’s script, astutely inviting the audience to be drawn into the painter’s viewpoint that embodies the perception of what is real shifts with and within time, and among individuals, and why these distinctions between the real and unreal are so compelling. For a small theater company that has cultivated an excellent reputation on original plays that seek to build an empowering sense of social conscience, Plan-B has managed to make an enlightening, accessible statement of artistic experimentation in ‘Di Esperienza,’ which encourages audiences to contemplate the holistic process of the creative endeavor, significant in the nature of the completed and unfinished work.

Michael Brusasco, making his Plan-B debut as Leonardo, is impressive in his deep understanding of Bennett’s treatment of the artist. The script covers an amazingly complex territory of detail in a rather fast-moving 80 minutes. Equally distinguished is Teresa Sanderson’s performance as Isabella d’Este, where the noble reverence for the artist is matched by her nuanced respect for the gravitas bestowed on her role. Kirt Bateman clearly enjoys the often darkly comic elements as Judas Iscariot while Tracie Merrill manages with solid effect the enigmatic dimension of La Gioconda. The cast, justifiably a bit visibly nervous on the opening night in tackling an extremely complex, interlaced script, found its cohesion in ensemble especially during the last third of the play (which is offered without intermission).

The round stage setting with three tall panel screens representing sketches from Leonardo’s notebooks, Jann Haworth’s costume design smartly blending Renaissance and contemporary elements, and the music and sound effects render a realistic backdrop to the other realm as embodied in Bennett’s script, thereby giving the audience a feeling that it really exists. At the end, Bennett wisely leaves the blur between the fantastic imaginary and the actuality of biographical details, asking others to contemplate, like Leonardo, their own everyday experiences.

Rounding out the creative production team are Cheryl Ann Cluff (sound), Jennifer Freed (stage manager), Jesse Portillo (lighting), Randy Rasmussen (set) and Cory Thorell (props).

‘Di Esperienza,’ only the third play in the English language to be written about Leonardo da Vinci, coincides with the 557th anniversary of his birth and was developed in partnership with The Leonardo and Utah Shakespearean Festival’s New American Playwrights Project.

The production run continues through April 19 with 8 p.m. performances on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. performances on Sundays. The play is being staged in the Studio Theatre of the Rose Wagner Center for the Performing Arts, located in downtown Salt Lake City.

Tickets are moving fast. For more information, see here.