“Everything symbolizes something,” one character says to another during a secne in Steve Yockey’s Sleeping Giant—and it’s hard not to view that as both a thesis statement, and a bit of a challenge. Throughout the tight 80-minute running time of Yockey’s new play, individual scenes build on one another while initially seeming disconnected, with a mysterious phenomenon providing the bridge between them. Each one of those scenes builds on an approach to religion and groupthink that might be playfully sacrilegious, and deliberately elusive about our need to find meaning in a world that changes faster than we can keep up.

For Salt Lake Acting Company’s current production, four actors play a variety of roles in a narrative that begins with a young couple at a lakeside house, where the elaborate marriage proposal by Ryan (Robert Scott Smith) to Alex (Lily Hye Soo Dixon) might also have awakened a … something from the bottom of the lake. Later, friends Barbara (Cassandra Stokes-Wylie) and Maggie (Dixon) find their brunch plans delayed by Barbara’s lingering unease after a strange encounter. And another women named Mable (Stokes-Wylie) greets a pair of guests (Smith and Tito Livas) with a freshly-baked cake and a story of how she’s reacting to the stories about the lake-thing.

Yockey’s text layers these scenes so that their interconnection only gradually emerges, all taking place on wonderfully versatile set design by Halee Rasmussen that allows one room to become multiple different residences, and eventually even the afterlife. The cast members take on their multiple roles in a way that makes the characters just distinct enough, while placing them all in the context of people having very life-changing experiences with the uncanny.

That’s really the subject Sleeping Giant is dealing with—how do we respond to the mysterious and unknowable in our lives—in a way that could be interpreted as addressing everything from religious faith to a powerful political or social movement. There are subtle metaphorical undertones to scenes that seem mostly predicated on Yockey’s sly sense of humor, like a confrontation between two romantic partners (Smith and Livas) that superficially is about a sexual infidelity, but also touches on what happens when one person in a relationship begins a spiritual journey that the other can’t understand. And throughout, there’s the realization that the creature which sends so many people into reactions of anxiety, devotion or despair hasn’t actually done anything. Every response to it is a projection that says more about the person than about the awakened creature.

The lively performances and sharp direction by Emilio Casillas and Shawn Francis Saunders make Sleeping Giant a satisfying entertainment, but it’s the kind of entertainment that might bubble through your brain afterward in unexpected ways. Maybe we keep needing to replace one god with another. Maybe we’re all so desperate to discover “the secret” that we do crazy things. Or maybe we’re all just trying desperately to make sense of the world, when we’re hard-wired as humans to believe that everything symbolizes something.

Sleeping Giant runs through Oct. 16.