Locals and strangers
7,000 flyers were stranded in a Canadian airport after 9/11. ‘Come From Away’ at Chrysler Hall tells their harrowing story.
Among unlikely subjects for a musical, “Come From Away” ranks in its unlikeliness with works such as “Sweeney Todd,” about a guy making mincemeat pies out of humans. But “Come From Away,” a musical about the real horror of 9/11, ending with a standing ovation and accompanied by an onstage Celtic Caeli party? That is worth seeing.
Unlikely as it sounds, that’s what’s happening at Chrysler Hall, a polished touring production well worth a gander, albeit telling its truth more remotely and artistically than so far suggested.
The 2013 Canadian musical (which took four years of buffing to make it to Broadway) is set not at Ground Zero in New York but at Gander International Airport on remote Newfoundland.
It’s on Gander that 38 planes were diverted on Sept. 11. And it’s here that those nearly 7,000 frightened and, in some cases, belligerent people joined with nearly the same number of Newfoundlanders in a sort of five-day existential “Costume Party” (the title of one of the musical numbers) that had everyone — locals and guests — questioning who they were in a world gone so terribly, murderously wrong.
In his book on the musical, “Come From Away: Welcome to the Rock,” Laurence Maslon, along with the show’s creators, Irene Sankoff and David Hein, explains that besides its weird title, “Come From Away” had two strikes against it from the start: It had no stars in it, and people insisted on calling it, yes, “the 9/11 musical.” What it does have, instead, is an ensemble of eight musicians playing Celtic-sounding instruments and 12 yeoman actors playing many dozens of parts, all as crafted by Sankoff and Hein from their interviews with the real participants.
People in Hampton Roads may be less puzzled than others by the title, since the longtime inhabitants of Virginia’s Eastern Shore traditionally call themselves “From Heres” and recent arrivals “Come Heres.” That’s the same idea. Geographic isolation tends to sharpen our innate, survival-based clannishness. But it can likewise sharpen our sympathies, our willingness to include the woebegone stranger, who can, if worthy and willing, perhaps be adopted into the clan.
Besides having the same actors play locals and strangers, here’s how the show unifies things theatrically. We have a simple open set, bordered by a dozen or so tree trunks. Add a high back wall of rustic wooden boards with an opening or two to represent a plane’s cargo hold or a door. (It’s there that one island animal lover will locate holds hiding dozens of traumatized pets and even two bonobo apes.) Add a couple of beer signs, mounted on the tree trunks, to turn on for the downtown bar scenes and turn off when we’re on the tarmac or inside the planes — which we are a lot at the beginning, conveying the claustrophobia of passengers forced to stay onboard for over 24 hours before even deplaning at Gander. Add a few unmatched wooden tables and a dozen or so chairs, strategically positioned on a turntable central stage. Then everything else is lighting and sound, expertly imported in this Nederlander touring production.
Those random unmatched chairs quickly align to become a plane’s cabin seating. They are regrouped around tables to suggest the town’s bar or the school, which now houses several hundred drop-in guests. The turntable stage allows for split-second timed walking-while-circling movements, a simple but impressive device — still or moving — to instill the feeling of being trapped forever on a plane or in a line to use one of the 75 phones, or riding wearily on a bus through dark, isolated country to an unknown (to you) destination.
The Gander experience was especially traumatic for the many non-English-speaking passengers. There were Make-a-Wish Foundation kids en route to Disneyland (mentioned, though not depicted).
The group included many religions — Christians, Jews, Hindus and those suddenly very suspicious Muslims (one well played by Ali Momen). There is a feuding gay couple, one also played by Momen.
Julie Johnson plays the local Earth mother Beulah, chief comforter to Hannah (Danielle K. Thomas), whose son is a New
York City firefighter and unreachable by phone.
Kevin Carolan, as the hard-working mayor of Gander, is a first-among-equals in the ensemble. Christine Toy Johnson plays Diane, who bonds with a potential love interest, a reluctant, fishout-of-water Brit (James Kall). James Earl Jones II (third cousin of James Earl Jones) does a nice job depicting characters Black and/or other. The people of Newfoundland, Maslon notes, are and were overwhelmingly white, but positive casting principles have resulted in a dozen daring actors of white, Asian, Black, Arabic and other backgrounds — particularly helpful in playing those planeloads of international passengers.
As varied as those passengers were, Maslon notes that the musical has an “Our Town” feeling, akin to Thornton Wilder’s 1938 rendition of the living and the dead in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. The dead don’t speak directly here, but the 3,000 victims of 9/11 speak indirectly quite loudly and give the work its necessary gravitas.
To depict the warmth and generosity of the Newfoundlanders, creators Sankoff and Hein include many (a bit too many) humorous scenes. This is, after all, the writing team that gave us “My Mother’s
Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding.” An example: a quick number celebrating an all-male, all-volunteer toilet cleaners’ brigade. (Toilets in such a situation do, admittedly, become a major consideration.)
But anyone who has ever felt helpless and under the purgatorial control of unknown omnipotent forces (anyone who has ever flown on an airplane) will feel the angst conveyed in this show, along with gratitude for the deep humanity many people summon to cope. And to see that, indeed, is worth taking a gander.