In a single act, Lookingglass Theater Company’s new production of “Icarus” burns through a primer’s worth of classical mythology, from the crowning of King Aegeus to the fall of the show’s title character, fleshed out with the raw and ingenious physicality of its six-person cast.

The loose tapestry of stories is bound together with acts of breathtaking aerial ballet, dance and the evocative color shifts of a large video background. The skeletal set and incantatory style are a testament to the show’s origins as a staged reading, and each actor is double-cast, changing aspects so fluidly you can lose track of how many people there actually are in the ensemble.

Despite the play’s title, Icarus (gracefully played by Lindsey Noel Whiting) and his father, Daedalus (Larry Distasi), are often at the sidelines. Daedalus, an inventor and distant father, steps in and out of the tale. His wife, Naucrate (Nicole Shalhoub), forces him to witness the stories playing out onstage in an attempt to free him from his numbness following Icarus’s death. David Catlin’s script likewise uses the broad back of myth to project images of the fierce — sometimes dangerously so — relationship between fathers and sons.

Against the bloody history of ancient Greece, where violent death is a commonplace, parental grief is no less sharp. Where Daedalus fades into blankness at his child’s loss, Minos (Anthony Fleming III) demands the sacrifice of other people’s children to avenge his own, and Aegeus (played by Adeoye), believing his son to be dead, hurls himself into the sea.

After he does so, his body seems to hang and writhe, suspended in a wash of marine-colored light. This haunting staging of a drowning death is a powerful example of the simple alchemy of movement and light that the Lookingglass is capable of; earlier the use of a strobe light added a dreadful charge to the disorientation of a flagging hunter.

This full-throttle staging makes for an intense hour and a half, but the script necessarily gives short shrift to some of the tradition’s most interesting players, like the deadly Medea (also played by Shalhoub), post-infanticide but not yet burnt out on blood, and a phenomenally athletic Minotaur (Adeoye), whose chase and imprisonment is expressed through a dance of primality and perfect control.

The shade of Icarus steps with a child’s dreamy lightness through the flashbacks that torture Daedalus, and his final flight, descent and death are expressed in a gorgeous, heart-stopping rush, culminating in a free fall into the same watery blue light that claimed Aegeas.

It’s a climax worth building a show around.