War hits home in Kipling saga

Inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s poem “My Boy Jack,” written after the author lost his soldier son in World War I, British playwright David Haig tells the story of Kipling’s loss -- with global, timeless resonance -- in his drama of the same name, forcefully staged in its American premiere by International City Theatre.

The tragedy of Jack Kipling’s death was compounded by the fact that his famous, vociferously pro-war father, a leading voice for imperial Britain, had pulled strings to get his son an officer’s commission in the Irish Guards after the teenager had been rejected by the army and the navy due to poor eyesight.

Kipling, the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize, used his position as a literary lion to publicly exhort all young men to do their patriotic duty; his own son would be no exception.

Jack was reported missing in action in France in 1915. In Haig’s view, Kipling was never the same. For two decades, the author and his wife searched for Jack’s remains, while Kipling tried to find meaning in his son’s death, struggling with the beliefs that had defined his own life and work.

Haig’s poignant play, given a cogent, sensitive staging by director Shashin Desai, is very much a family story. Set in the library of the Kiplings’ gracious home in Sussex and in a grim trench at the western front, it begins as Rudyard (a precise, effective rendering by Randy Kovitz) zealously orchestrates Jack’s military commission.

His wife, Carrie, played with unexpected layers by Gillian Doyle, reveals fearful reservations, and daughter Elsie (a too-contemporary Erin Cummings) is outspoken in her disapproval.

Kipling’s conviction is that of a true believer. Jack, fresh-faced and vulnerable (an achingly convincing Travis Vaden), wants to do his part as much to escape his beloved but larger-than-life “Dado’s” smothering presence as to satisfy his own youthful patriotism.

In the play’s stark shift to the front, Jack and his men -- Bowe (Brett Elliott), Doyle (Tyler Moore) and McHugh (Donan Whelan) -- wait in rain-soaked misery for their futile charge across the battlefield. As young men whose short time in the trenches has already made them older than their years, the four actors are utterly believable.

The scene is all the more haunting for the visual and aural punch provided by set designer Don Llewellyn and Bill Georges’ lights and sound. Costume designer Kim DeShazo’s military uniforms and marvelous period gowns and suits and Llewellyn’s well-appointed library set reflect the same commitment to authenticity.

In Haig’s telling, Kipling’s rigid self-control, the habit of a lifetime, is part of the family’s tragedy.

It’s clear that this iconic symbol of the British Empire loves his children, holding them (in flashback) and telling them stories. Yet his response to the news that Jack is missing in action is to call his son’s sacrifice “the finest moment of his young life,” and to point out to his shattered wife that Jack would have been humiliated and shunned if he hadn’t joined up.

It is shellshocked Bowe’s graphic account of the horrific battlefield that exposes Kipling’s bottomless devastation. Just as devastating is how the author resolutely regains control. Both Elliott and Kovitz bring visceral truth to their respective scenes.

While not every moment in this well-crafted production is as deeply realized, neither it nor the play’s reverberant messages -- of the wasteful, ghastly reality of war and its irrevocable shaping of survivors’ lives -- are easily shaken off.

*

‘My Boy Jack’

Where: International City Theatre, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Ave., Long Beach

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays- Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Sept. 26

Price: $30-$38

Info: (562) 436-4610

Running Time: 2 hours, 15 minutes