“Splitting Infinity,” winner of UCSB’s first International Script Competition, will have its first staged reading by professional actors on Jan. 28, at 5 p.m. at REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in Los Angeles. Admission is free, but reservations are required; call x6090 for details.

Television, stage, and film actors Sharon Lawrence, (Sylvia Sipowicz in “NYPD Blue” and Maisy Gibbons on “Desperate Housewives”) and Saul Rubinek, (“Unforgiven” and Donny Douglas in “Frasier”) will star. Michael Cassidy, best known as Zach Stevens on “The O.C.,” will co-star.

The play focuses on a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who pursues evidence of God through physics, while simultaneously upsetting the balance of her relationships with her oldest and closest friend, a rabbi, and her star postdoctoral student, the son of a Christian Scientist.

A brief award ceremony will be held before the reading to honor Jamie Pachino, playwright and screenwriter, for her winning script in the Scientists, Technologists, and Artists Generating Exploration (STAGE) competition created by UCSB’s Professional Artists Lab and the California NanoSystems Institute. A post-reading reception that is open to the audience will include 2004 Nobel Laureate David Gross, one of the competition’s judges, as well as the playwright, cast, director, and others from the arts and sciences.

The STAGE competition, which awards a $10,000 prize to the best new play about science and technology, evolved from a shared desire to make science more accessible to the public and the theater more reflective of today’s technological age.