The story is set in the period after the Great Depression in the year 1936. The place is Pittsburg. The Piano Lesson follows the lives of the Charles family in the Doaker Charles household and an heirloom, the infamous piano. The play focuses on the arguments between a brother and a sister who have different ideas on what to do with the piano they own. The brother, Boy Willie, is a sharecropper who wants to sell the piano to buy the land (Sutter's land) that his ancestors had toiled on as slaves while the sister, Berniece, remains emphatic about keeping it. The piano shows the carved faces of their great-grandfather's wife of son during the days of their enslavement.