Rutherford and Son

Theater can surprise you, even when you think you know what you’re expecting.

I went to the UW School of Drama’s production of Rutherford and Son last Sunday afternoon. It was the final performance, and not as full as UW Drama usually gets, due to snow and sports conditions. I did not have high hopes for it.

What I knew about the play going in was minimal, but I did know that it is a seldom-produced play in the high Realism style of the late 19th/early 20th century. That was enough to color my expectations. I anticipated minutely detailed characters and plotting and a complex family drama, and the attendant length to facilitate all that detail. And indeed, the run time was listed as three hours, with two intermissions. I didn’t do any more research into the play or production than that – I had assigned it to my Intro to Theater class, so seeing it was compulsory, and Realism is, if nothing else, accessible, so I didn’t feel any need to prepare myself beyond steeling myself for what was sure to be a long afternoon.

I attended on my own, as my fiancée couldn’t take four hours out of her class prep to go to a play that I may or may not have described as “potentially boring.” “If I go,” she said, “it probably will be a waste of time. But if I stay home and work, it will be terrific and I’ll wish I had gone.” And she was absolutely right.

When I sat down and took a look into the program, I was immediately put at my ease. The MFA director was Cody Holliday Haefner, who directed last year’s devastating Trojan Women: A Love Story. I knew then that the audience was in good hands, three hours or not.

The title characters of Rutherford and Son are a wealthy industrialist who has expanded the glassmaking factory his own father started, and his eldest son John. The elder Rutherford had raised and trained John to take over the business, but the son opted to strike out on his own. Now, married and a father himself, John is unable to support his young family, and has brought his working-class wife and their infant son to take refuge in his father’s home. John’s two adult siblings also live in the house – and in the shadow of their domineering father.

With Rutherford and Son, Haefner takes us into the toxic depths of a wealthy industrialist’s family relations. The director and the production team have worked assiduously to reveal the family’s tensions as a symptom of the tension between the demands of capitalism and the dream of familial love and support. “How do they persist,” Haefner asks, “when the dream seems futile, and yet without it, all that remains is ‘the bare struggle for life’?” This family drama speaks with such relevance for our own struggles. Capitalism demands so much of us in that “bare struggle for life,” as one of the characters puts it. How can we balance that with our deeper needs?

Rutherford and Son was a sensation when premiered in 1912, and seemed poised to take a place alongside A Doll’s House and The Cherry Orchard in the canon of Realism. But somehow, after it became known that the playwright was a woman, the successful initial production in London did not translate into wider popularity, and the play has been forgotten since. The School of Drama found that only two American theaters have staged this play since that London premiere. I’m very grateful for having seen this worthwhile play in such a powerful staging. 

The next play in UW Drama’s season is In the Heart of America, opening March 6th and directed by Amanda Friou, the other MFA director. I don’t know much about it, other than that I’ll be there. And if you want a dose of high Realism through a modern lens, the Seattle Rep will be opening Lucas Hnaths’ A Doll’s House Part 2 on March 15th.

Brace Evans as John Rutherford, Senior