‘PLAY’ FOR KEEPS
Writers of B'way hit 'Come From Away' married after 9/11 brought them closer
She was always running off to acting gigs, he to recording studios. For a married couple, Irene Sankoff and David Hein didn’t get to see each other much — until they started writing shows together.
Now, seven years later, they’re the proud parents of two: daughter Molly, 3, and “Come From Away,” which is up for seven Tonys Sunday night, including Best Musical. It’s set on and just after 9/ll, when 38 jumbo jets were detoured to tiny Gander, Newfoundland, whose townspeople fed, sheltered and soothed 7,000 strangers.
It’s a story of compassion, resilience and pride — especially if you’re Canadian. Speaking from the Broadway stage when he saw the show in March, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “The world gets to see what it is to lean on each other.”
Sankoff and Hein know all about leaning on each other.
“We share everything,” Sankoff told The Post, as her husband added, “I can’t write anything without thinking, ‘Irene can make this better!’ ’’
The 40-something Canadians met in college and soon became inseparable. In 1999, when Sankoff left for New York and grad school, Hein followed. They were staying at International House uptown the day the towers fell; Hein’s cousin Tanya Chauhan, who worked at the Citibank on the ground floor, fled after the first plane hit.
They planned to marry the next fall in Toronto, but 9/ll changed everything. “I woke up one morning, thinking, ‘What are we waiting for?’ ” Hein said. That Oct. 12, they went down to City Hall for a marriage license. Sankoff recalled seeing the words “Heroes live forever” scrawled in dust on a store window.
Flash ahead a decade, to the couple’s first success: “My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding,” based on Hein’s mom’s reallife nuptials. They were back in Toronto when a friend told them about an upcoming 10th-anniversary reunion of “plane people” and locals in Gander. Could that be a musical, too?
The couple flew to Newfoundland and did hours and hours of interviews that they turned into a book with songs.
Molly arrived on a summer Tuesday in 2013, two days before the deadline for submitting “Come From Away” to the New York Musical Theatre Festival. Sankoff was holding her newborn and a breast pump when she pressed “send.”
The road to Broadway was paved with Playbills and Pampers. Molly cut her first tooth during a research trip to Newfoundland, took her first steps at a Toronto rehearsal and celebrated her first birthday at a workshop in Seattle.
As director Christopher Ashley discovered, there are benefits to having a baby onboard. “David and I once spent about an hour and a half assembling a car seat,” he said. “It was an absolute bonding experience!”
That Sankoff and Hein are married has been a huge plus, Ashley added: “They’d keep trying to solve the problem all night long and come in with 10 or 20 solutions. Often they’d pitch the other person’s favorite idea with total enthusiasm. They were as smart about their relationship as they were about [writing] a musical.”
(Hein and Sankoff’s rules for working together: “Don’t talk about the show when you’re tired or hungry; don’t talk about it in bed or in the morning — Irene’s not a morning person!”)
So far, the couple said, Molly has seen only snippets of the show, often while perched on her dad’s shoulders from the back of the theater. She calls the cast and crew “my people” and knows them so well that when ensemble member Chad Kimball missed a show she asked, “Where’s Chad?”
“She’s so resilient,” Hein said. Now back home in Toronto, they say they no longer worry about the effect all those moves have made on a little girl. “People tell us [that] Molly’s home is wherever we are.”