[1] The play’s plot dramatizes the labor struggles in the West Virginia coal mines of the 1920s and the evangelical Christian fundamentalism prevalent among poor whites in the region.
[2] Crashing the Gates opened in New England, but its didactic theme and profanity displeased audiences and the play closed shortly after its debut.
When Sally discovers her step-brother's death, she flees hysterically from his corpse, and is shot down by her step-father Buzz, mistaking her for Syd Gody.
Cain discussed the [dramatic possibilities of a story] based on the widely prevalent feeling in the West Virginia mine fields that the Second Coming was near.
[10] The initial production in Stamford elicited “outrage” from a number of audience members due to the profanity in the second act, “the strongest language ever heard on a stage until that time”, in which the disabled Oakey condemns Gody and his mother Linda as frauds.
[13] Cain had assumed that the profanity that accompanied the contemporary social conflicts in the early 20th Century would not be judged on the “pruderies of the Victorian Age.