The play employs a series of vignettes and short scenes, with the actors portraying some 52 characters, to capture the sense and substance of America in the Great Depression. The central figures are the Baums, a wealthy family whose fortune has vanished in the stock market crash, but their story is amplified by brief glimpses of other lives; a farmer who has lost all in the dust bowl; a prostitute who exchanges her favours for dental work; a white Southern sheriff in thrall to a black short order cook; a young man who dreams of success on Tin Pan Alley, etc. The play becomes a deeply affecting evocation both of a tortured time in American history and to the indomitable spirit of the people who survived in the face of unaccustomed adversity.

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