UP, UP AND AWAY
Gander’s post-Sept. 11 kindness is celebrated in Come From Away
Gander’s kindness to stranded 9/11 passengers is celebrated in ‘Come From Away,’
GANDER, N.L.— Out of a late-summer sky of spotless blue, they came, plane load after plane load, to this speck of a town scored into the low, flat rock of central Newfoundland.
Not one of them chose it. On that awful day a little more than15 years ago, choice was luxury and survival enough.
But for the 7,000 people abruptly stranded here in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001, this community of 9,000 people left a mark: of sympathy and of compassion for the humanity drawn forth by the worst of things, and of horror blunted with goodwill, yielding, against all reason, hope. Some were forever changed here. “This place made me who I am today,” says Kevin Tuerff, who was rerouted here that day on his way home to Texas from a vacation in France. “It just sets an example so few of us seem able to rise to.”
On a recent day this fall, Tuerff was back for a very emotional convergence.
Under that same, unbroken expanse of blue, the airport, quiet at the best of times these days, bustled with a flood of arrivals. This time, it was a homecoming of sorts. For Tuerff, for Beverley Bass, an American Airlines pilot who touched down here that day, and for hundreds of others, to see their memories filtered back through a strange new lens: a Broadwaybound musical, packed with stories of that awful day and the outpouring of goodwill the stranded thousands found here.
It has taken almost five years, but those stories have evolved into Come From
Away, a small experiment of a production born in Toronto through Sheridan College’s Canadian Music Theatre Project in 2011.
It’s grown, through small-scale workshops and theatre festivals from Connecticut to California to Seattle, to a fullblown, rip-the-roof off musical epic.
Come From Away played most recently at Washington, D.C.’s Ford theatre, on Sept. 11 and will reopen Toronto’s storied Royal Alexandra Theatre on Tuesday.
In the spring, Broadway, the gold standard, beckons.
But before the big time, Come From Away came home, here, in a local hockey arena for a pair of sold-out charity shows.
It’s a thank-you to the town — for sharing their stories, for doing what they did, for having the patience and grace to allow any of this to be possible — but thanks barely begins to cover it.
“For those of us in the business, this is the kind of experience you dream of,” says Kenny Alhadeff, one of the show’s producers with New Yorkbased Junkyard Dog Productions. “You dream theatre can tear down walls, touch the heart and the soul, make a difference. This? This is the epitome of all that. I know it sounds corny, but it’s a privilege to be here with it.”
Diane Davis can step right back to that awful moment: teaching conservation to her Grade 3 class of rambunctious 8-year-olds at Gander Academy, word came in of attacks in New York City. A decision was made quickly: school was closing and the children were going home.
“We told them they were safe, that it was far away,” says Davis, a softspoken, no-nonsense type whose easy laugh unveils a bottomless, matter-of-fact warmth. Here, in her home, a bright-yellow bungalow across from the Academy, she hastily straightens a mound of books and magazines on the coffee table while her partner Leo smiles.
“You can’t save the world and keep house at the same time,” she laughs.
When she retired from the Academy after 30 years of teaching last June she didn’t sit still for long. An organizer for the arrival and settlement of five Syrian refugee families here, her retirement is a daily experience of helping a couple of dozen newcomers find their feet in a strange new land.
“I retired on a Friday and the first Syrians arrived on a Tuesday,” she smiles. “It’s a wonder Leo didn’t leave me right then.”
Davis has always taken an interest in those in need. On that day more than 15 years ago, the skies full of planes, she braced for what was to come. She called friends, who called friends, and soup and sandwiches were hastily thrown together.
“It just kind of snowballed,” Leo remembers. “We all went down to the town hall to see what we could do to help and, by the time we got back up the hill, there were dozens of us.”
The first bus arrived from the airport at about midnight. Davis brought them into her home and fed them whatever was on hand. They took turns using her phone to call home, wherever that was: the Middle East, Asia, Europe and beyond. “And they just kept coming,” she said.
From the front steps of Diane and Leo’s house, you can see the Academy, three churches and a community hall. Before the night was over, every one of them would be stuffed full with stranded passengers.
All over town, the same story: thousands of people with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and airline-issue pillows and blankets. The rawness of the attacks, not 24 hours before, meant sequestering all luggage in a secure hangar to check for threats.
They were hungry, exhausted and terrified.
“Just being in the airport here can still give me PTSD,” Tuerff says. “Once we got out of there, everything changed.”
In the dead of night, Gander was ready. Soup, sandwiches, blankets, air mattresses and toothbrushes started arriving in waves — so much food, in fact, that over the next few days, Mayor Claude Elliott started steering the excess to the ice sheet at the hockey rink, hoping it would keep.
Brian Mosher, host of a community television show, broadcast a plea to quell the flow of a particular generosity: “I had to go on air and tell people to please stop bringing toilet paper to the Legion hall because they didn’t know what to do with it all,” he laughs.
“I think it was a blessing, really, for us to be able to feel useful in a moment where the world felt so hopeless,” says Davis.
In typical local fashion, she shrugs off the accolades with a matter-offact cheer. “We just did what was common sense at the time. When you saw those planes hit, you really understood how much these people needed help. So . . .” Her voice quavers. She takes a moment to compose herself. “So we helped. We helped.”
Davis’s stories, and Mosher’s, and Tuerff’s, and dozens of others all made it into Come From Away’s final cut. But Irene Sankoff and David Hein, the show’s husband-and-wife writing team, knew they couldn’t capture more than a sliver of it.
“I always say we wanted to tell all 16,000 stories, but it’s a 100-minute musical,” says Hein.
Locals and passengers alike were amalgamated into composite characters: Brian Mosher became Janice Mosher, a mash-up of him and another local, Janice Gouldie; Diane Davis became Beulah Davis, a merger of her and Beulah Cooper, another local woman who worked tirelessly to feed the arrivals. (“It’s an honour,” says Davis, wryly, “though how someone could play me as half a character, I can’t imagine.”)
In 2011, Sankoff and Hein came to Gander on a fact-finding mission. Armed with a Canada Council development grant and a promise from Michael Rubinoff, the head of Sheridan’s Canadian Music Theatre Project, they started knocking on doors.
“It was tough; I mean, we’re the outsiders,” Sankoff said. “I just kept telling myself, ‘This is important, you’re supposed to be here.’ ”
Quickly, they became absorbed. “Irene and David and I would have check-in calls every few days,” Rubinoff says, “and they would be like, ‘We’ve moved out of the hotel and into somebody’s house; they gave us their car; they told us they were going on vacation and to take care of the cats.’ It’s just like that here.”
After a month, they were awash in possibility. “We kept getting invited for dinner, or for tea, or to go hunting. And we came away with thousands of stories, literally thousands,” Hein says. “But we also came away with friends.”
No production makes it to Broadway without endless development, testing, writing and rewriting, and Come From Away is no exception. After a test-run at Sheridan in January 2012, Rubinoff, Sankoff and Hein started the festival/conference circuit. First stop was the Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals in Connecticut later that year — the first time the show would be seen by an American audience.
“I remember David and Irene were ashen-faced,” Rubinoff says. “I kept saying, ‘No, no, no, it’ll be great!’ But the truth is, I was completely freaking out. I thought, are they going to run us out of the theatre? But once it got going, I thought the roof was going to blow off. That’s when I knew: Americans can get this.”
It was as important to Sankoff, Hein and Rubinoff that Newfoundlanders could also get it, the fact of which Petrina Bromley, the only Newfoundlander in the cast, was acutely aware.
“I will admit openly that I had reservations at the beginning,” she says. “Newfoundlanders know that they’re seen as the hillbillies of Canada, so I went in thinking, ‘Is this going to be all rubber boots and yes b’ys? Are we going to look like yokels?’ But David and Irene wanted these people to feel honoured and not be a cartoon for other people’s amusement. And they’ve done that.”
After Goodspeed, the show travelled in the fall of 2013 to the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s annual Festival of New Musicals in New York, a front-line marketplace for shows in development to hook up with production-company suitors. Alhadeff, who was there for Junkyard Dog, remembers a surge of elation and panic both.
“My wife said, ‘You run up there and be at the front of the line,’ ” he said, recalling a scramble to the stage with applause thundering all around. “I don’t usually push like this, but I just said: ‘Hello, I’m Kenny, a Tony-Award-winning producer and I want to do your show.’ ”
More than 30 production companies tried to woo Come From Away to their stable, but Junkyard Dog won out. “This isn’t the case of a bunch of Americans coming in to take over,” Rubinoff says. “They have this incredible heart and respect for the story. It’s been beautiful.” Gander, for better or worse, has always tied its fate to the skies. Main streets here are named after famous aviators — Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, Marc Garneau — and the local high school’s team mascot, the Concorde, tells you much about the unrequited dreams of a jet-age whistle-stop that outlived its usefulness almost as quickly as it had been established. The Second World War made Gander’s airport a strategic asset, used by the Allies as a base for thousands of missions to Europe. But it was the postwar aviation boom that made it blossom. Transatlantic commercial flight was growing, but planes still needed a fuel stopover and Gander was it.
Local lore boasts of the Beatles’ first touchdown in North America, in 1964, being not in New York but Gander, where they stopped for a fill-up en route.
Gander’s runways grew in size and number. Soon, it could accommodate the biggest planes in the skies. But as jets increased their range, Gander became a flyby. The international terminal, a Mad Men- esque mid-century time capsule of lowslung, boxy vinyl furniture and crisp wood panelling brimming with jetage optimism, was largely mothballed; Gander became an outpost once more.
Then, that bright September morning when it was needed most, Gander was there: a town long in search of a defining moment had one foisted upon it.
On a chilly autumn evening this October, it had another. Outside the local hockey arena, a lineup — polite, patient, huddling against a rising, icy wind — shuffled two by two inside, the rink remade for the night into a makeshift opera house. The room was packed and another crowd just like it was waiting for show No. 2, later the same night. “I can’t imagine how a bowl of soup, a sandwich and a blanket could turn into this 15 years later,” said Elliott, elated.
The cast, in their best Newfoundland brogues, shifted easily from character to character, setting up the ordinary foibles of ordinary life in an unremarkable small town — the school bus drivers are on strike, the school needs a new roof — about to be thrust into the realm of the extraordinary.
An opening number, “Welcome to the Rock,” built to a taut, declarative refrain (“I am an islander/I will not be drowned”), all but bringing the crowd to its feet. It was a good sign; the piece wasn’t five minutes old.
Come From Away moves like that: brisk, agile, never lingering on low notes long enough to be maudlin, nor on its many laughs (and make no mistake, there are many) long enough to be corny. By the end of the second performance, not only was the entire audience standing, stomping and clapping along, some of them were on the stage: Elliott, for one, dancing a jig with Jenn Colella, the actress who plays Beverley Bass
Bromley, milling in the crowd, admitted to art bleeding into life a little more than planned. “There were a few tears up there that weren’t in the script,” she said. “We were really just trying to keep it together.”
Nearby, Rubinoff, cheering loudly from his seat about 10 rows back, stood up, agog. He shifted from foot to foot, dabbing at his eyes. “We didn’t know how they’d react. We didn’t know. Would they just be polite? But this . . .” He shook his head.
A few rows away, Hein and Sankoff were overcome with people offering handshakes and hugs, and much more of the latter. “We’ve seen this show 33 times now,” said a tearful Sankoff. “But never like this.”
“I can’t imagine how a bowl of soup, a sandwich and a blanket could turn into this.” CLAUDE ELLIOTT MAYOR OF GANDER
Davis, in the second row, sat quietly in her chair, transfixed by the elation around her. She had brought about a dozen of the Syrian refugees in her care to see the show, giving them the front row. One of them, a spirited 3-year-old girl, kept wandering near the stage to dance. When Davis finally stood, she let go a big, deep breath, her eyes moist and red.
“Some of the stories they told up there were word for word. Word for word. It put me right back there. They really listened,” she said. “It’s overwhelming. I think for the first time in my life, I don’t have the words.”
In the final moments of Come From Away, the planes alight and keen homeward, and the bright sunshine of their time here becomes crowded out by dark thunderheads. Outside the arena, this very night, the sparkling blue sky above was giving way to a stiff wind that, by morning, would bring an icy, sideways rain. Now, like then, Gander’s moment in the sun was ending. But its legacy is written for good. Come From Away is at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre Nov. 15 to Jan. 8. See mirvish.com/shows/come-from-away for tickets and information.