In the arts, the greatest legends are born in unfinished work. In the Art of Fugue, written as the composer was going blind in the middle 1700s, Johann Sebastian Bach left the penultimate four-part fugue incomplete. All sorts of myths have been spun about its unfinished status. His physical incapacitation took over. It was intended as an abstract exercise for musical scholars. The great composer left it open ended, embedded with cleverly disguised clues, so that future musicians could complete it. No definitive answer has yet emerged about what he really meant with this final work.

Today, the myth-generating impulse about creative artists is as strong as ever. In the days following author David Foster Wallace’s suicide last fall, many fans lamented that he did not repeat the success of his 1996 novel Infinite Jest. However, word spread quickly that an unfinished manuscript – The Pale King – would be published posthumously. The only certain thing is that in whatever form this unfinished book will be published, the manuscript likely will not be the one the author would have sent ahead to the editors had he been able to complete it. Wallace was a painstakingly obsessive reviser of his writing. For example, his papers showed draft after draft of Infinite Jest in various forms.

There is an odd curiosity in the enterprise of completing the unfinished work of the deceased artist or in dissecting the artist’s intentions. Suddenly, diaries, letters, essays, sketches, notebooks and even the mundane artifacts of shopping lists, bar tabs, and credit invoices take on substantive material importance in clarifying the creative artist’s meaning. Our fascination with that unrecoverable lost aspect of the creative genius is, at best, crudely alluring.

In Di Esperienza, the upcoming world premiere Plan-B Theatre production, playwright Matthew Ivan Bennett resists forming a cohesive statement about Leonardo Da Vinci in a script that brings to life figures from three of his most iconic – and unfinished – masterpieces. They are La Gioconda (a/k/a The Mona Lisa), Judas 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).

The play’s run begins April 3 and 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.

Bennett’s script which seeks to deconstruct the myths and the doubts of Leonardo da Vinci appears as much a master’s thesis as it is a commissioned work by Plan-B. Supplemented with a rigorously reviewed and annotated bibliography, he tackles the imperfect person that few have even been willing to do when it comes to theatrical works concerning the great artist and inventor.

“Yet, doing the research I couldn’t really know him through his work,” Bennett says. “What really inspired me personally was his ability to adapt as an artist. He left a long trail of unfinished work but he also was an adept chameleon who managed to be gainfully employed as he jumped from sculpture to painting and back to sculpture and to other genres venturing far into science and invention.”

The play is a bold step of experimental theater for Plan-B and for Bennett. In a bit of deft, postmodern counterpoint, courtesy of the playwright, 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.

In particular, Bennett’s play attempts something that Internet and digital media users will appreciate and recognize – that on stage, the characters will be much like images online that can be held in a state of suspension, in effect inhabiting a virtual space where any viewer can recall the images at will, thereby connecting them back to their time and space characteristics at their creation.

Jerry Rapier, director of the production, acknowledges the actors have their work cut out for them in navigating their fluid time-space boundaries of their multiple characters. Of particular note is the costume work courtesy of artist Jann Haworth, who has managed to blend the elements of a Renaissance style with contemporary clothing. Judas, for example, sports an overcoat and clothing with a Middle Eastern flair. Costumes include layered T-shirts and stenciled jeans. Isabella d’Este wears a hoodie adorned with puffy Renaissance-style sleeves. The overall effect, according to Rapier is to show that all of these characters stem from Leonardo and, regardless of standing alone or in concert with the others, they can never be complete without the artist.

(NOTE: Haworth, who has lived in Utah for more than 10 years, often is recognized immediately as being the co-designer for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover, for which she received a Grammy. Local residents also know her well as being the project director for the Sgt. Pepper mural project that can be found on 400 West between 200 South and 300 South. More about her is available here.)

The sparse stage intensifies the focus on the word which opens up the cordoned-off spaces in museums. In many respects, Bennett’s script steers clear of imposing one’s own truths and ideologies onto the subject. Bennett’s language becomes a form of social practice, giving the audience member a resource – an artistic platform so to speak – upon which the audience can focus on how the characters participating in this stage discourse ‘feel’ by analyzing their own interactive social and cultural behaviors.

“The power of ideas isn’t our ability to approximate reality but in their ability to inspire us,” Bennett says. “We like titles and we like the lines that clearly divide the average artist from the master. Da Vinci would do something brilliant and then be demanded to do it again and again. However, he couldn’t replicate that brilliance and it wasn’t in him. He spent a great deal of energy in those moments of mastery. The challenge is to deconstruct the mystique of the artist.”

Therefore, for Bennett, DaVinci’s story is simultaneously inspiring and disempowering. Rather than argue about what is “real” he approaches these artistic canvas texts from the perspective of multiple worlds and various representations. The context of the myth surrounding DaVinci’s intelligence becomes a series of theatrical constructs that then can be compared and evaluated on the basis of what they include and what they omit, and from what background or environment they come from and the social factors and interests that drive and influence their formulations and their projections, popularized or not.

Simply and directly, Di Esperienza is as much about the myth of intelligence as it is about the myth of Da Vinci. In a modern society where narrow specialization is championed and students from elementary school to college are characterized and categorized according to percentile rankings, Bennett sees the corrective response to the educational shortcomings in that spirit of experimentation that defies boundaries and categorization. In the play, Judas Iscariot, La Gioconda, and Isabella d’Este mirror this counterpoint finding themselves in ever-shifting positions of being face to face and of hidden (and not so hidden) empowering and disempowering relationships, and of being pulled in many directions.

Therefore, Bennett opens the door for the audience to glimpse into how ideology is packaged in the Da Vinci myth and to become aware of the messages that so often lie beneath the surfaces of our own experiences. It is to awaken our consciousness to recognize, as Wallace suggested to members of the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College, that we should not be prisoners of the default settings in our routine lives.

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 cast includes Kirt Bateman as Judas Iscariot, Michael Brusasco as Leonardo da Vinci, Tracie Merrill as La Gioconda (Mona Lisa), and Teresa Sanderson as Isabella d’Este.

Rounding out the creative staff is set design by Randy Rasmussen, sound design by Cheryl Ann Cluff, lighting design by Jesse Portillo, and props design by Cory Thorell.

The play’s running time is 80 minutes. For ticket information, see here.