New musical celebrates love, humanity post-9/11

At Washington's Ford's Theatre, your eye is immediately drawn to the empty flag-draped presidential box looming over the stage.  The site of an assassination is probably the last place you'd expect to find a musical about 9/11.  Indeed, the historic theater sits but a few miles from the spot where hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the western side of the Pentagon, killing 189 people15 years ago Sunday.

Yet there's a reason Come From Away, bound for Broadway in February, has played to packed theaters in San Diego and Seattle before it opened this week for a month's run in Washington, just days shy of the anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil or anywhere.

"My cousin was in one of the towers, but fortunately got out," says David Hein, who with his wife, Irene Sankoff, wrote the book, music and lyrics. "So we feel a deep responsibility to get it right. It's not a 9/11 story, it's a 9/12 story about how this tiny community of Gander, Newfoundland, (pop. 9,951 in 2001) responded to this horrific tragedy."

On the eastern edge of North America, Gander — once famous as a refueling stop for overseas flights — became an accidental host community on 9/11, almost doubling in size when nearly 7,000 people on 38 commercial jets were diverted to Gander after American air space was shut down.  Think of Come From Away as the counterpoint to the horror inflicted on America, where residents of Gander put their lives on hold for the better part of a week to welcome strangers from around the world until the U.S. air space reopened.

"I wasn't sure if this was a musical," says Irene Sankoff, "but David, who grew up on Newfoundland music (a kind of seafaring Celtic folk sound), said 'Wait until you hear Newfoundland music at the Gander kitchen party benefit concert' that we attended on the tenth anniversary of 9/11."  They interviewed former passengers who returned to Gander to thank the community and ended up staying in Gander for months, debriefing townspeople for four or five hours a piece.

Among the tales that Hein and Sankoff discovered and wove into the play is the love story between Nick and Diane Marson, both divorced — he's a Brit, she's a Texan —  who arrived in Gander on 9/11 on the same flight. At the shelter where both have been sent, Nick spotted this "nice looking lady who was on her own and asked 'Is it alright if I bed down on the cot next to you?' "  Diane responded, "Sure.  What could I say?"  They spent their post-9/11 days together in Newfoundland and kissed for the first time on a school bus heading to the Gander Airport to leave Newfoundland. They married a year after 9/11.

In the play, Diane says, "The only reason we met is because this terrible thing happened." And later confides, "To think, our happiness is based on this tragedy is too much" and she proceeds to break down.

Emotion runs through Come From Away. Geno Carr, a member of the ensemble cast who plays no fewer than eight named roles in the production, was in rehearsals for a play not far from the Pentagon on 9/11.  He's not just looking forward to making his Broadway debut with the musical in the winter, but next month will travel with the entire company to Newfoundland for two concerts based on the musical.  "One of the things that art does is to turn a mirror on humanity, where we can look at ourselves. What this musical does so well is to show there can be wonderful things amid the darkness."

Indeed, Come From Away succeeds simply by allowing some of the horrific images of 9/11 seared into our minds to recede, even if just for an evening.  It celebrates the humanity and hospitality on display in Gander in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Where locals embraced total strangers — fed, housed and clothed them, even turned over their car keys to people they had just met.

It's just the kind of upbeat story that Ford's Theatre Director Paul Tetreault says was purposefully scheduled for the anniversary of 9/11. "Stories like Come From Away, where we see human kindness shine through the darkness of tragedy, have a unique resonance in a theater space where Abraham Lincoln's great tragedy occurred."