A middle aged upper class woman and her family live in an upscale neighborhood. The family's laughter turns malicious when they cannot distinguish between what is comical and what is horrendous and increasingly find amusement at the expense of others.

Al Roosten, a local business owner always second-best to his competitor, Larry Donfrey, contemplates returning to an anti-drug charity event to ensure that Donfrey is able to help his disabled daughter.

A woman returns home to her family having just slept with another man. At dinner, her son gets into an argument with his father about their privilege. As the narrative moves back to the time they spent abroad in Nigeria, Burma and Ecuador, fractures in the family life are revealed.

A working class man who wants his children to have everything their rich friends have purchases "Semplica Girls" — girls formerly living in poverty who sign contracts to hang as ornaments in people's yards — for his older daughter's birthday. When his younger daughter frees the Semplica Girls, the family is plunged into financial disaster.

A lonely and financially unstable middle-aged man tries and fails to sell Everlasting Beauty kitchenware to a family on the Black side of town in order to pay for his daughter's schooling.

A young man who went broke moves back to Chicago and lives in his aunt's basement. Meanwhile, he becomes a roofer where he is exposed to a spectrum of poverty, racism, and power among his colleagues.

A middle-aged tax consultant who is dissatisfied with life has a night that begins with a wrong address and ends in a liquor-fueled spoken-word poetry party.

Nana, a twenty-nine year old Ghanaian-American man from Cleveland, tries to repair his relationships with Sassy, his high school sweetheart, and Edwin, his Princeton-educated older brother, when Edwin comes home for the first time in five years.

A rambunctious but well-meaning Armenian family imagines what must have become of an absent family member, who is away at work. Via letter, their family member reveals the most earth-shattering news.

In Iowa, a young Black man goes to a party where he meets a host of artist types who cause him to reflect on how people relate to each other.