“Can we go back to the kill of Jerry?” Jared Larkin asks the high-school students working with rapiers and daggers in his stage-combat class, then adds an aside to the spunkiest little actor in the room.

“Make better choices, please," he says kindly to his 2-year-old daughter, London, who is threading through her father’s legs and restlessly wandering near the stage. Larkin may be talking to her, but it’s the same sentiment he offers in notes to the actors parrying onstage in front of him.

As the fight blocking continues, London entertains herself by dancing and weaving through the rows of auditorium chairs, then wraps herself in the stage curtain for a one-girl show of hide-and-seek.

“The kill of Jerry” — that’s a striking line of dialogue during a class that hits pause when the toddler-in-residence asks for a bottle and her father reflexively reminds her of her manners. When she says “please,” he requests she follow up with the sign-language gesture.

That juxtaposition underscores the theater professor’s daily juggling act, just another everyday scene in the ongoing Father’s Day story of Jared Larkin’s life. At 41, the Mormon man has fallen into the role of an accidental trailblazer after adopting a baby on his own, which makes him an anomaly among adoptive parents in Utah and nationally.

And, as a single parent, he has chosen to avoid day care, instead drawing upon the support of his bosses, family, LDS congregation, friends and select students who volunteer to baby-sit.

He teaches with London in tow as an adjunct at the Salt Lake School for the Performing Arts and in his day job as an assistant theater professor at Westminster College. When school is out, London regularly sits in on meetings or auditions for shows at the Pinnacle Acting Company, which Larkin co-founded with his longtime acting colleague and best friend, Melanie Nelson.

London spent the first months of her newborn life in a carrier on her daddy’s chest as he taught his classes. Now she plays as he teaches, and when it’s nap time, she sleeps on a nest of blankets in a corner of his Jewett Center classroom.

“I don’t think there’s a first that I’ve missed — first words, first steps,” he says. “I get to spend most of every day with my kid. That’s a gift, that I can put together the two things I’m most passionate about — my child and my career.”

For Larkin, every day is Take Your Daughter to Work Day, and the make-believe world of educational theater offers an intriguing backdrop for raising a toddler. “This duality is the biggest challenge,” he says, offering the material of his stage-combat class as an example. “I teach them how to hit, and then I tell her not to hit.”

Gender bending single-parent stereotypes

Spending time with Larkin, a white Utah man who adopted a black baby girl, offers a beautiful portrait of a contemporary family. It would be a compelling scene in any Father’s Day portrait to envision Larkin up late at night, Googling YouTube videos to master the rubber-band twists of styling his daughter’s kinky, curly hair.

“I am just finding him to be such a loving, caring father through this whole thing who somehow manages to balance everything,” says L.L. West, a producer at Pinnacle and himself a theater dad, but one who has an involved wife. “For so many theater people, theater drives their life. It’s such a time demand being in the theater, but Jared’s priorities always seem to fall pretty much in the right place.”

Beyond the dynamics of making a living while also making art, Larkin’s relationship with his daughter presents another kind of twist, a gender reversal of the American stereotypical story of the do-everything juggling of the noble single mother.

After all, when Americans acknowledge the challenge of single parenting at all, it’s mostly considered a women’s issue. “It’s a little disturbing that everyone fawns over how beautifully Jared does this — and it is amazing — but women do it all the time, with heels on,” says Nina Vought, a faculty colleague and one of Larkin’s biggest supporters.

In kid-friendly Utah, a very married state, the story of a then-39-year-old straight man adopting a kid on his own seems remarkable. Like the rest of us, Larkin knows single adoptive mothers and gay adoptive parents, but can't think of other single adoptive fathers.

No agency keeps statistics that clearly delineate the demographics of single adoptive fathers. Utah and national adoption experts confirm that single fathers adopting babies they aren’t related to are rare cases.

They are so rare, in fact, that at least one Utah adoption agency wouldn’t accept Larkin’s application. At another agency, an official questioned his motives, telling Larkin she suspected he was a child trafficker, homosexual or pedophile. Larkin says he told the woman her statement was offensive and actionable, but rather than getting his lawyer involved, he agreed to work with the agency if it would treat his application fairly.

His might not have been the most conventional path to parenthood for a Mormon man, but as Larkin moved through his 30s, building a career as an actor and teacher, he always planned on becoming a dad. In his family of six children, Jared was always the one who planned the games for his nieces and nephews at family reunions, says his mother, Sharron Larkin. He was the kind of kid who asked for a Franklin Day Planner for a Christmas present at age 14, she says, because he knew he needed to be organized to get all the ideas in his head completed in his lifetime.

When his relationships didn’t translate into marriage, Larkin decided not to wait any longer and settled down to build a life that would allow him to adopt.

That meant moving from Los Angeles back to Utah in 2005. That meant saving up money for adoption fees. That meant buying a house large enough to accommodate his retired parents, then persuading them to move from St. George to Draper. That meant building a support network.

When Larkin applied for a teaching job at Westminster, he told the hiring committee he planned to start a family on his own. "We said: ‘We support you 100 percent doing that and having a career here with us,’ ” recalls Vought, an associate professor of theater design who also heads the dance department. She and her husband, Michael Vought, head of the theater department, reared their two sons in the same hallways at the liberal-arts college, which, despite years of discussion, hasn’t yet opened a day-care center.

“He’s such a conscious human being, and that’s the way he has raised London, just really consciously,” says Nina Vought, who helped Larkin enlist mothers to donate breast milk for London. “He’s got a wide support team, and that’s because Jared is a supporter. He’s always willing everybody to succeed. That’s what he does.”

When your life is a musical

Later Tuesday morning, London Larkin is on a walk with her dad across the Westminster campus, skipping and dancing down the sidewalk toward the fountain as if she owns the place.

This pre-nap walk is the prime time during London’s day when she gets to just be a kid, and, along the way, she sings.

The toddler, conceived in Queens, N.Y., first sings bits and pieces of “I Wish,” from “Into the Woods,” and in an especially fitting choice, “I Think I’m Going to Like It Here,” from “Annie,” the exuberant Depression-era musical about an orphan girl. "She likes both the white ‘Annie’ and the black ‘Annie,’ ” Larkin says.

It’s part of the daddy-daughter ritual that, at the fountain, she splashes in water that falls over engraved words from William Shakespeare: “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

Larkin is thinking a lot about the Bard on this morning, as he is learning his lines to play Antipholus of Ephesus in Pinnacle’s “The Comedy of Errors,” which runs through June 27 at Westminster College. Larkin also is helping to produce the show, which sounds glamorous, but translates to running to Home Depot during teaching breaks to buy more materials for the set and then staying after rehearsals to paint it. One colleague watched him grading student papers while he was backstage at rehearsal waiting for his cue.

“In the middle of the week, London came down with croup, so he was up all night trying to help and comfort her, and it’s all up to him, which is so different from the experience I have had as a parent,” says actor April Fossen, also in the cast of “Comedy,” who with her husband, actor Mark Fossen, has reared two children while juggling rehearsal and show schedules.

London seems blissfully unaware of the balancing act going on around her. For her third musical reference on the walk, which continues across the wooden bridge and down to the banks of Emigration Creek, London sings “A Spoonful of Sugar,” from “Mary Poppins,” one of her favorite musicals. London thinks all coins are tuppence and keeps one special British coin tucked away in her quiet book in honor of another favorite song, “Feed the Birds.”

“She thinks her life is a musical,” Larkin says.

From dream to reality

“If you watch their relationship, she was just meant to be his,” says Larkin’s mother, who with her husband, James, helps out with occasional baby-sitting. “They are a perfect fit, London and Jared.”

How that match was made holds a spiritual dimension for Larkin, who says he had hoped to adopt a black child. When his parents went on a mission to Ghana for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he jokingly asked his mother to bring home an African baby.

The backstage details of how he was matched with London’s mother are also singular. Larkin was waiting to get his adoption book back from the printer, the all-important book meant to persuade a pregnant woman to select him as an adoptive parent, when he got a call from the agency. “Do you have the money for the adoption fees? We may have a situation for you.”

They had briefed a pregnant 20-year-old New Yorker about Larkin, calling it a “weird situation, a single guy,” and then she asked if his name was Jared and described his appearance. “She told them she had had a dream, and that she was having a little girl, and I was supposed to be her child’s father,” says Larkin, the story reducing him to tears in the retelling.

She originally had asked for a closed adoption and didn’t even want to the know the gender of her child. She chose a Utah adoption agency so she could hide her pregnancy from her family and friends.

But her feelings changed, and from the table at her first ultrasound, the woman instructed adoption counselors to text Larkin immediately to tell him he would be getting his baby girl.

Larkin went with her to doctor’s appointments and held her hand in the hospital during the 18 hours of labor before London was finally delivered via C-section.

“I stayed the night in the hospital, and we took turns changing diapers and feeding her,” Larkin recalls. “We wept together, and I realized the gift she had given me, and she realized the gift I had given her.”

She stays in touch with Larkin and has recorded a storybook for London. Larkin hopes eventually to take London and her birth mother to see “The Lion King” on Broadway, which will probably be the first show London will ever see that her father didn’t direct.

Larkin has heard criticism about his choice to raise a child alone, as well as questions about his decisions to bring her to work.

“Whatever the criticism, how many children get to connect to what the parent does for a living?” says Jerry Rapier, a theater colleague who three years ago adopted a son with his spouse, Kirt Bateman. “Other children should be so lucky. And when you’re in the arts, it’s more than just a job.”

Since theater requires artistic problem-solving, adding single parenting into the mix might be considered just another creative challenge, Nina Vought says.

Like any parent, Larkin still worries. He worries about balance, about preserving the academic quality of his classes despite his toddler’s distractions. He works to expose his daughter to female role models, as well as planning play dates so she’s around other children.

As an actor, he learns lines in the car on his commute, while his daughter watches DVDs of musicals in the back seat. As a single parent, he keeps choreographing his complicated art-filled life.

Larkin’s stage-combat students say having London around has made them more aware of safety. At Westminster’s graduation ceremonies, Larkin overheard a graduate telling a friend that she would miss theater classes, but most of all she would miss London.

The 2-year-old’s curiosity has made it easy for her to be embedded into Westminster’s theater department, and having a kid around has helped students connect to their own childlike enthusiasm, says Nina Vought, who calls London one of the most joyous human beings she’s ever met. “You can’t be around that girl and not bubble up with joy.”

The Larkin family’s dramatic flair was on display several weeks ago at the department’s awards dinner. London Larkin was watching as the students around her received awards, both serious and silly.

After London’s name was called, for a surprise award as “most likely to win your heart,” she knew exactly what to do, bounding to the stage to claim it, not even waiting to hold her father’s hand.

Larkin laughs: “All she needed was a tiara.”

ellenf@sltrib.com

facebook.com/ellen.west

• 'The Comedy of Errors’

• The Shakespeare comedy, presented in masks in the Italian commedia dell’arte style, plays through June 27 at 7:30 p.m. at Westminster College’s Jewett Center for the Performing Arts, 1250 E. 1700 South, Salt Lake City. Tickets are $18 ($15 seniors/students) at pinnacleactingcompany.org or at the door.