When we first meet Ruby Sunrise, she has run away from home and is alone in her aunt’s dark barn attempting to repair a broken generator. The setting is Indiana in 1927, and she is in a race with science and her own desires. At 17, Ruby has big plans to build the first television, and her urgency to complete her experiment with electrons and phosphorescent dots is far more important to her than telling the truth or falling in love.

Ruby is the upstart focus of Penobscot Theatre Company’s production of “The Ruby Sunrise,” Rinne Groff’s award-winning drama of unsung women heroes, as well as the ruthless politics of commercialism that can steal their fire. The show, running through Sunday at the Bangor Opera House, is an episodic look at Ruby’s choices, her family’s secrets and the challenges smart women too often face in the corporate domain of men.

If the general theme of Groff’s play sounds somewhat familiar – smart girl gets overlooked – it’s because the playwright does not cover a lot of new territory, even as she delivers an industrious amount of history including a digression about the blacklist and a love story. The action ranges from pre-Depression days to the rise of the golden age of TV, and it’s fun to revisit those times in Lex Liang’s period costumes. But the essential plot is one that does not have much novelty: A brilliant inventor does not get the credit, the patent or the citation she deserves in the history books. Ruby’s ultimate dream – that TV be the great democratizer – also gets derailed along the way, presumably because of greedy executives drawn to starlets instead of true grit. Boy, do we ever already know this story.

Some may hear echoes of Clifford Odets here, too. Admittedly, Odets’ plays can sometimes be clunky, but word-for-word, they are gracefully written despite being padded with progressive politics. Groff has the same ambitions, but her style is less poetic and exciting.

Shannon Walker plays Ruby in the first half of the play, and Kari Floberg plays Ruby’s daughter Lulu in the second half, which takes place in 1952 at studios in New York City where, as a Midwestern script girl, she is trying to shape a teleplay about her mother’s struggles. Both actors have to deliver didactic lines about science or personal beliefs, and even with their energetic performances they can’t make them sing. Paul Rhyand as a money-driven TV executive, Christopher Yeatts as a lowly writer and A.J. Mooney as Ruby’s drunken aunt (and later as an aging star in the only bomb outfit of the show) have fewer lines but are given more to work with – and do.

The night I saw the play, the set changes, which take place in shadowy light but are impressively stylized and include entertaining music and TV clips, had more moxie than the pacing of the performances, which were often difficult to hear clearly. This is a script that needs more of the boundless energy that Ruby herself is meant to represent, and even then, the authorial voice is so strong that the storytelling sometimes slips into a supporting role.

Director Scott R.C. Levy is to be admired for taking chances on newer works, and particularly for nudging his audiences toward thinking about contemporary issues such as the failure of TV to educate the masses or the place of war in our home screening rooms. For the record, this play was produced after the start of the war in Iraq, but posits that if TV had done its proper and patriotic job, it would have ended war because, as Ruby says, “Who could bear to see war right in your own living room?”

The final scene of the play is the most engaging because it recreates a TV studio in action – and the technology adds a jolt to the otherwise flat ending. But the jolt isn’t enough to save the script. Groff is a prolific American playwright whose themes are worthy and provocative. Nearly everyone admires her dedication to all the right ideals, and so do I. But it’s tempting to wish she had crafted a more enticing story out of so many intriguing elements.

Penobscot Theatre Company will present “Ruby Sunrise” Thursday-Sunday May 3-6 at the Bangor Opera House on Main Street. For information and tickets, call 942-3333 or visit www.penobscottheatre.org.