Five Rooms of Furniture
Rufus is a divorced retired gardener who lives in the basement of his older sister’s Chicago home. A diabetic, he’s had both legs amputated below the knee but remains determinedly independent, swaggering around on artificial limbs and a cane and sparring with his termagant sister, Ina Mae. Also living with Ina Mae is her sweet-tempered but timid daughter Vernell, who quietly runs interference between her mother and uncle and cares for her mentally ill husband, Gary.
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The storm cloud in their lives is Rachel, Rufus’s daughter. A naval officer eager to get out of uniform, she comes home to claim some antique furniture that Rufus’s former employer, a Holocaust survivor, bequeathed to him. Like Walter Lee, who dreams of opening a liquor store in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Rachel wants to open a vintage-furniture store–and find out what really happened the night she and her mother moved out of their house, after a visit from Ina Mae. Rachel rightly suspects that something was going on other than what Ina Mae told Rufus–that his wife had left him for another man.
The relationship between Ina Mae and Rufus is the crux of the show, and LaDonna Tittle and Ernest Perry Jr. are entrancing to watch. Whether the brother and sister are trading quips, dancing to the tunes on Rufus’s new stereo (one Rachel bought him to replace the antique Victrola she covets), or facing down the past, these two actors have the sort of chemistry that makes you believe they’ve spent years under the same roof. While Perry does fine work with the good-hearted but stubborn Rufus, Tittle has the harder job–making us understand her meddlesome character. Ina Mae’s bitterness comes through early in a comment to Rufus about his days as a gardener. The problem with flowers, she says, is “you forget to water them one day, they get pissed off and die.” Parched for affection and justice, Ina Mae is mightily pissed off but not at all ready to give up the ghost.
