The play is set in the Southside of Chicago, “sometime between World War II and the present” (4). The action takes place in the living room of the Youngers, a Black family. The room is clean but well-worn. At the beginning of Scene 1, it is very early morning, and Travis sleeps on the sofa’s pullout bed. His mother, Ruth, enters. Ruth “is about thirty. We can see that she was a pretty girl, even exceptionally so, but now it is apparent that life has been little that she expected, and disappointment has already begun to hang in her face” (4). Ruth shakes awake Travis, “a sturdy, handsome little boy of ten or eleven” (5). As Travis stumbles into the bathroom, Ruth calls for her husband, Walter Lee, to wake up, in this carefully-choreographed routine for sharing the family’s single bathroom. 

Walter, “a lean, intense young man in his middle thirties” (5) appears sleepily to wait for his turn in the bathroom. He asks Ruth, “Check coming today?” (6). Irked, Ruth replies, “They said Saturday and this is just Friday” (6). Ruth asks Walter how he would like his eggs, and although Walter says, “Not scrambled” (6), Ruth begins to scramble the eggs.