Theatre in Review: Rutherford & Son (Mint Theatre)"There's not a scrap of love in the whole house," comments one of the bitterly unhappy members of a Northern England industrial dynasty in Rutherford & Son. The play's title is also the name of the business -- a glass factory -- that feeds the Rutherford family while murdering their souls. "Did you ever hear of Moloch?" asks John, one of the three adult children who have had their happiness sacrificed to commerce and, indeed, the reference is apt. Their father's devotion to his enterprise verges on idol worship, and his children are the sacrifices he offers. Not that Rutherford père a tyrant. He's surprisingly mild-mannered, a milquetoast accountant type who rarely raises his voice in anger. He doesn't need to: By keeping the purse strings tied and his love carefully withheld, he has stripped his children of anything like ambition or self-esteem; they're prisoners in their own home, watching the days fly by as they furtively pursue illusory dreams of escape. One son has managed to become the local vicar, but he is so hobbled by his father's indifference that he pathetically begs his permission to move away. "Folks like him look for a return from their bairns," says Ann, the gimlet-eyed family auntie of the elder Rutherford, and, tragically, for both father and children, the dividends have been nonexistent. The action of Rutherford and Son details the unraveling of the family, even as the father struggles to hold on to his failing business. Audiences in 1912 were shocked by Githa Sowerby's drama, not least because it was written by a young woman. ("This new dramatist, about whom half the play-going world is talking, is just the sort of young Englishwoman you may meet by the score on tennis lawns or up on the river," marveled the reviewer in the Daily Mail.) A hundred years later, the script remains a cold-eyed assessment of the havoc wrought in a family circle where every transaction is dictated by economics rather than affection. In a funny way, it's a kind of cousin to Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, but Sowerby is even more remorseless in her conclusions. This is the second time the Mint has mounted Rutherford and Son; the first was in September 2001 and, despite good reviews, it was no doubt overshadowed by the events of 9/11. The current staging retains the director (Richard Corley) and star (Robert Hogan), along with a few supporting actors from that original production. They join with several new performers to offer a fine account of a drama that, for all its old-fashioned touches, remains strikingly relevant today. In the tradition of her time, Sowerby was a solid dramatic carpenter, willing to spend one act out of three building her foundation before unleashing a series of blistering confrontations. Contemporary audiences aren't used to such a leisurely approach, although, to me, it's a pleasure to see the author go about her work, lucidly laying out her conflicts and confidently establishing a tone of slow-burning tension. It all builds to an Act II climax in which Janet, the daughter of the family, a tart-tongued lass of 36 facing spinsterhood, is caught having an affair with her father's right-hand man. Exposed and with nothing left to lose, she releases a lifetime's worth of pent-up fury, practically daring her father to thwart her, and promising that there will be hell to pay if he tries to do so. Sara Surrey's carefully controlled rage and trance-like intensity brought down the house at the performance I attended, and for good reason. She returns in the third act for an even more wrenching encounter with her lover (David Van Pelt), who has suddenly gotten cold feet; as she begs him for his love, all he can think of is how to get back into Rutherford's good graces. Other members of the solid supporting cast include Eli James as the feckless John Rutherford, Jr., who pathetically thinks he can best his father in business; James Patrick Nelson as the son who has taken the cloth; Sandra Shipley, fully of vinegary observations, as Ann; Dale Soules as an elderly woman who frantically defends her son, one of Rutherford's employees, against charges of embezzlement; and Allison McLemore as Mary, young John's wife, a mousy young thing to whom nobody pays the least attention until she turns out to be the canniest negotiator of all. I wish Hogan's patriarch were just a tad more commanding, and it would be nice if his British accent was more spot-on, but you feel each time he enters the room. Corley's direction offers many telling details -- Janet sullenly kneeling before her father to remove his shoes, or Mary briskly pushing aside the dinner plates, sitting down at the table to make her opening offer to the father-in-law she detests. The production design is equally solid. Vicki R. Davis' setting, a kind of parlor/dining room, is furnished to suggest wealth without comfort or good taste. Upstage are backlit panels depicting a windswept winter landscape. Hanging everywhere are pieces of etched glass, reminders of the business that is the reason for, and the bane of, the Rutherfords' existence. Charlotte Palmer-Lane's costumes and Nicole Pearce's lighting are perfectly fine. The sound, by Jane Shaw and Ellen Mandel, often pits a piano melody or a gramophone tune against the pounding of industrial machinery. (Mandel also contributed the original music.) The auditory collision between melody and manufacturing is a most apt metaphor for Sowerby's powerful account of lives both fed and destroyed by the Industrial Revolution. She based Rutherford and Son on her own family's history. Having seen it, I have no doubt she knew her subject appallingly well.--David Barbour 
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