"I think the play has started," the man next to me kept saying to his companion. He can be forgiven for not being sure, because even though the house lights were up and most of the audience was still chattering away, there were actors milling about onstage.

At this point, they were playing themselves. They were greeting one another, stretching, going over their lines, and waving to their friends in the audience. There was no curtain drawn for this production; the set was designed to look like a rehearsal room. All the actors were visible for the whole production; when not performing, they sat just outside an area marked off with red tape.

Lane Richins played Chorus (an entire Greek chorus embodied in one man), and he had an easy, conspiratorial manner as he fulfilled his traditional role to introduce us to what was going on, calling out various accomplishments of the actors. When he introduced Nicki Nixon as Antigone, for example, he mentioned that it was her professional debut.

Richins also had a copy of the Salt Lake Tribune --- I'm told the theater subscribed for the month of February to provide him with a fresh copy each day -- and he made cracks about that day's headlines. "New fossile discovered," he said on this particular night, Feb. 4. "And beneath that, a story about Orrin Hatch. Coincidence?"

This offbeat way of easing us into the production was one of my favorite things about "Too Much Memory." It made the onstage action seem more like it could be part of our real world, bringing the events of this ancient tragedy more into modern times.

Another memorable moment was the love scene between Antigone and her fiancé, Haemon. As she straddled him, she outlined his body in chalk, a sensual act that infused their lovemaking with echoes of the violence that was to come, and also served as an abstract representation of her brother's unburied body, around which was the source of play's conflict revolved.

The crux of this play, though, hangs on the showdown between Antigone and Creon, the king who has decreed that her brother's corpse must lie above ground to rot. Nicki Nixon and Morgan Lund are magnificent in their roles here. In an interview, Nixon explained that she had some experience with animal rights activism in her teens, and that she prepared for these scenes with Lund by reading transcripts of the 1968 trial of the Chicago 10 for inciting an anti-war protest. It showed clearly in her impassioned speech about the higher law she was following by burying her brother. For his part, Lund played the beleaguered leader with convincing world-weariness and impassivity.

Together, they nailed the point of the play: "When you won't consider another point of view, you destroy everything around you."

But I did wish that this had been more of an update than it was. Antigone was a girl whose mother was also her grandmother; she was engaged to her first cousin; and she was willing to face death if her brother didn't get a proper burial. While leaving those elements intact did help show the timelessness of the theme, the action would have felt more relevant if these plot points had been exchanged for modern equivalents.