Of the more than 70 people who appear on The Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper" album cover, only 12 are women.

That's always been a sore spot with Jann Haworth, a co-designer of the "Sergeant Pepper" album cover and one of the few women in the 1960s British pop art movement.

The artist (who moved to Sundance, Utah in 1997) got a chance to redeem her original vision in 2004 with "SLC Pepper." She directed the design of the mural at 250 S. 400 West, which gives equal space to women, many of whom are known more for intellectual contributions than for looking good in an evening gown.

Now Haworth is helping to reshape images of history in another way, through her costume design for Plan-B Theater's "Di Esperienza" (Italian for "of experience"), which opens Friday.

The world premiere by Plan-B's resident playwright, Matthew Ivan Bennett, attempts to bridge the gap across five centuries to help modern day audiences relate to Leonardo da Vinci as a man plagued by self-doubt and procrastination despite his many accomplishments.

In the play, Leonardo has conversations with characters who represent three of his unfinished works: Judas Iscariot from "The Last Supper," La Gioconda -- aka, the Mona Lisa -- and Isabella d'Este, a patron whose portrait he sketched but never finished painting.

"The intention of the piece is to deconstruct the man and the myth, and Jann has spent her entire artistic career doing that in various ways," says director Jerry Rapier.

The costumes Haworth has designed are not your typical Renaissance clothes; there are bell sleeves, but they adorn a hoodie; there are cloaks, but they're worn over jeans.

"At first glance it looks very Renaissance, and then you realize that Leonardo's wearing three layers of T-shirts," says Rapier, who points out that the star inside a circle on the outermost T-shirt is reminiscent of Leonardo's famous figure study, the Vitruvian man.

At the Rose Wagner to pick up costumes for alterations, Harward explains that costume design is much like painting for her, and that the clothing colors spring from the earth tones of Leonardo's notebooks.

But she also says, "Leonardo was known as a snappy dresser," as she displays a pair of pink leg warmers and a glittery pair of red low-top Converse shoes. The shoes, she says, were spotted by her daughter, Liberty Blake -- a Salt City Derby Girl who goes by "England's Glory." Another daughter, theater actress Daisy Blake, is the costume maintainer for the show.

Leonardo is played by Michael Brusasco, who also performed the role last summer when the play was workshopped as part of the Utah Shakespearean Festival's New American Playwrights Project.

Brusasco says that one of the challenges of the script is delivering the densely worded excerpts from Leonardo's notebooks. "It's like Shakespeare in that regard, except this isn't poetry, this is like intense algebra," he says. "How do you play someone who's 1,000 times smarter than you and give it that credence?"

Rapier says, "Leonardo was so mythical. Most people think of him in such greater terms than themselves that he's kind of inaccessible. Hopefully the full design of the show and the style of the play makes him less of a god and more of a man so that you can see yourself inside of his genius."

If the audience can walk away and say, "I totally relate," says Brusasco, then he's done his job.