A “come from away” is a noun in Newfoundland and Labrador; it means a person who comes from somewhere else. And in the tiny town of Gander, the “come from aways” arrived in such numbers on September 12, 2001, that they doubled the population. In the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack on September 11, passengers from 38 planes rerouted from New York sat on the Gander tarmac, bewildered, unsure what was going on. And then an amazing thing happened: the residents of Gander organized food, shelter and clothing for the passengers, many taking strangers home to take care of them. As the days wore on, they entertained the passengers; they threw a massive party for the Make A Wish children who had been on their way to Disneyworld; they comforted them to the best of their ability and showed them the beauty of both an incredible and wild island—and strength and kindness of its residents. These events have been immortalized in the Broadway musical Come From Away, and this summer the entire play is showing for the first time ever in Gander itself. If you can’t get to Gander before the run ends, 64 different North American cities will host the show through 2024 (as well as sites in the UK and Ireland next year).
For those familiar with the show, the characters are based on literal people, sometimes carrying their real names, sometimes being a composite of several people, and sometimes even having a gender switch to balance the cast. You’ll remember the Gander newscaster Janice who was overwhelmed by suddenly being the only person able to report on the extraordinary situation, not sleeping for days to do the constant updates, thrilled by being phoned by Oprah? Janice is really Brian Mosher, and when I met him in Gander for dinner, he showed me a photo of himself in his phone back at that heady time—and also a photo of a Jeopardy clue that references him: “I’m reporting live from Gander Airport where the 19th plane has just touched down.”
Today Brian tours giving talks about that time, along with his buddy “Oz,” another real-life character in the show. Oswald Fudge, the town’s lone police officer, infamously talked of pulling over speeding teens and writing them a ticket that just read STFD, prompting them to sound out the acronym, “Slow the *** down.” Oz often wears a bright blue T-shirt memorializing this, with a drawing of a police officer in aviator glasses holding his hand up, with the letters STFD. Brian gave a driving tour of Gander in his convertible, showing various sites like the Gander Collegiate and St. Paul’s schools and Royal Canadian Legion that housed people, and the SPCA where the real-life counterpart of Bonnie rescued dogs, cats and even a bonobo from the stranded planes.
The play begins at Tim Horton’s donut shop, and if you wander down there in the morning, you’ll still see folks gathering there. Don Purchase drove a bus for 40 hours straight to help ferry passengers from the airport into Gander for shelter and says of that time, “It was go, go, go like an adrenaline rush. Everything was coming at you to keep it going” and jokes that as a diabetic, he had a sugar rush from all the Tim Horton’s donuts. Mike Brennan cooked for the passengers and talked of how the town’s ice rink had been used as a giant refrigerator for the influx of food. Another man Clayton Winter, who sat between them, was out of town when the plane people came. Also at Tim Horton’s was Ivan Elliott, a franchisee for Canada Bread Company who supplied all the bread for Gander during this time, accepting shipments from St. John’s and working with his son Chris 24 hours straight. “That was trying times for us, but we lived through it. We were just a small part of what was going on.”
When it came time to watch the play itself, I noticed the set had been reconfigured to use white suitcases for all the props, serving as plane seats, bus seats, and even the Dover Fault lookout, the place where continents collided to form geological structures—and where characters Nick and Diane fell in love. You’ll see tiny crocheted squares in the stage background, all different. Residents had been asked to create 100 of these as a meaningful contribution to the set design, part of the Warm Embrace project symbolizing how these squares can be built into a comforting blanket and how each one can represent one of the special relationships from that time. Typical of Gander’s generosity, they created 2,300 squares. Nova Scotia residents Christine Robart and Wally Shishkov had rented a house to come to Gander to see the show and said of the crochet squares, “That’s what this community is like.”
Some elements of the play, written by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, have been lightly altered from the original Broadway run. For instance, the plight of the character Hannah, who can’t get word from her NYC firefighter son, is better mapped out (an admittedly difficult balance for a show that is by and large celebratory while still portraying horrific circumstances). In the audience on the second day of the run, I felt the incredible energy of an audience watching its own experience on the stage. Certain jokes landed huge for this Gander crowd who remembered the events of over 20 years ago—particularly, the call for “no more toilet paper!” as they had been deluged with donations. It was simply amazing to watch the unfolding of this community’s care and action in a situation that had no parallel.