Thirty-Eight Planes Landed in a Town of 10,000. Next Friday That Story Opens on Donelson Pike.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, American airspace closed. Hundreds of transatlantic flights already over open ocean had nowhere to turn around to. They needed a runway, immediately, and the nearest one for a great many of them belonged to a town most of their passengers had never heard of.
Gander, Newfoundland, population roughly 10,000, took 38 wide-body jets and parked them wingtip to wingtip on its tarmac. Somewhere between 6,600 and 6,700 passengers and crew came off those planes into a community that had, on paper, no capacity to hold them. It remains the largest emergency operation involving civilian aircraft in history — the effort remembered as Operation Yellow Ribbon.
What Gander did next is the reason there is a musical.
The show
Come From Away runs August 14 through 30 at The Larry Keeton Theatre, 108 Donelson Pike.
Written by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, the show is built almost entirely from interviews with the people who lived it — the townspeople who emptied their pantries and their linen closets, and the “plane people” who spent five days in a place that fed them, housed them, drove them around and refused to take their money. It won a Tony and an Olivier, runs without an intermission, and does the whole thing with a small ensemble playing dozens of roles.
That last detail is exactly why it suits a room like the Keeton. This is not a spectacle musical. There is no chandelier, no helicopter. There are chairs, a band, and a company of actors switching between a Newfoundland mayor, a Texan passenger and an airline captain in the time it takes to turn around. It lives or dies on ensemble work, which is the thing good community theater is actually best at.
Who's making it
Susan Walsworth directs — her fourth production at the Keeton. She is joined by music director Trey Lundquist, choreographer McKenna Driver, stage manager Kaleigh Ruiz, technical director and set designer Kevin Driver, assistant set designer Abby Waddoups, sound designer Steve Love, lighting designer Jesse Watts and costumer Denese Rene' Evans.
The cast includes Brian Best, Ben Gregory, Stephanie Jackson, Jack Joiner, Leslie King, Jayden Murphy, Tyler Samuel, Jason Scott, Melissa Silengo, Justin Tinker, Yolanda Treece, Ashlie Welte-Lopez and Claire Yancey.
Times, dinner and tickets
The Keeton is a dinner theater, so the schedule is a little more involved than curtain time:
- Thursdays — doors 6:30 p.m., show 7 p.m. (show only, no dinner service)
- Fridays & Saturdays — doors 5:45 p.m., dinner 6 p.m., show 7 p.m.
- Sundays — doors 12:45 p.m., dinner 1 p.m., show 2 p.m.
Pricing: $40 adult dinner and show, $35 child dinner and show, $30 show-only on Thursdays. Groups of 16 or more should contact the box office directly at (615) 883-8375.
Why this one still lands
Twenty-five years on, the 9/11 stories that get retold tend to be the ones about the towers. Come From Away is deliberately about the periphery — about what happened in a place far from the attack, among people who had no stake in it beyond the fact that several thousand frightened strangers were suddenly standing in their town.
It is a show about hospitality as a practical skill rather than a sentiment: how many cots, how much food, whose school gym, who drives the bus. That is a very Newfoundland answer to catastrophe, and it turns out to be a very singable one.
The run is short — about two and a half weeks — and it opens next Friday.
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