At the very beginning of the new play “Coal Country,” we are told it is “a West Virginia story about 29 men and a big machine.” This is an understated way to inform the audience that what follows will be devastating.

That story is true, and it happened in 2010, when those men all died in a devastating mining disaster. We learn a few things about some of the victims: that Cory was 5 when his dad took him out to shoot his first deer, and that Greg had been Patti’s neighbor for 22 years before he asked her out.

But really, we don’t know all that much about those folks because the show is about the ones who were left behind: It’s Cory’s father, Tommy (Michael Laurence), who recounts that hunt, and it’s Patti (Mary Bacon) who talks about Greg’s courtship. Memories and grief are what they have now.

Anger, too. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s “Coal Country,” with live music by the rootsy singer-songwriter Steve Earle, is also about why what happened at the Upper Big Branch mine can be called a tragedy, but it can’t be called an accident. A terrible twist of fate defines an accident. What happened at U.B.B., as everybody calls it, was precipitated by greed and cost-saving negligence — embodied by Don Blankenship, the chief executive of the company that owned the mine, and whose trial figures in the show. Conditions had gotten so bad that months before the explosion, an experienced miner named Goose (Michael Gaston) had told his wife, Mindi (Amelia Campbell), that U.B.B. was “a ticking time bomb.”