With great comic irony, the play of mistaken identities unfolds the coming-to-identity story of Ion and Creusa. He’s a naive teenage orphan who doesn’t know his parentage or even his name. She’s the queen of Athens, a supposedly childless woman with a secret: As a young woman, she was raped in a cave by the god Apollo, and in her shame, she abandoned her baby.
It’s a story concerned with infidelity and betrayal, perhaps even post-rape PTSD, but it’s also a story about parenting. “At its heart, it’s about a mother and a son who have been lost to one another,” says director Andra Harbold, who lauds the compression and pacing of David Lan’s recent translation.