Given Lookingglass Theatre Company’s twin penchants for adapting myths and performing aerial acrobatics, I’m surprised the troupe took this long to get around to Icarus and his fatal flight. But I’m glad they waited: a younger, brasher Lookingglass might not have been able to encompass the sad, wise, deeply moving interpretation offered here by writer-director David Catlin. The title notwithstanding, Catlin’s version actually centers on Icarus’s father, the legendary architect and inventor Daedalus. Youthful, foolhardy Icarian exuberance takes a backseat to the more grownup theme of raising a child and losing him, of building a family and discovering its shocking, heartbreaking fragility.
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Catlin begins with familial bliss on the island of Crete, represented by a bare stage and a backdrop that shows projections of bright, puffy clouds by day and an enormous moon by night. Each of three fathers—Daedalus, his boss King Minos, and Aegeus—has an adoring wife and an adored son, and for a while it’s all harmoniously choreographed movement and joyful swinging from white drapes. At night, Daedalus, his wife Naucrate, and young Icarus curl up in a bunch to sleep—a simple but touching image both of the family’s closeness and its vulnerability.
Theseus vows to kill the Minotaur, and Daedalus—finally spurred to action by Minos’s cruelty—helps him do it. Minos imprisons Daedalus for this betrayal and, for good measure, locks up Icarus, too. “I guess we finally have some time to spend together,” chirps the boy. But the ingenious Daedalus comes up with his famous, disastrous escape plan, fashioning two pairs of wings from wax and feathers so he and his son can fly away. Once more up in the white drapes, Icarus flies too close to the sun. The wax melts, his wings fall apart, and he goes hurtling into the sea. “I only looked away for a second,” laments a bereft Daedalus.
