By Stuart Adelberg
I recently had the opportunity to see a national tour of the show, Come from Away at the Palace, a beautiful, historic theatre in downtown Stamford. I had already seen and loved this musical show twice before, but I could not pass up the opportunity to see it again.
For those who may not be familiar, Come from Away is about the Newfoundland town of Gander, following the September 11th attack, when 38 planes with thousands of passengers were forced to land at their airport. The show recounts true stories of individual residents and the stranded travelers they welcomed to their small town. The circumstances most of us remember are anything but positive, but the show is an incredibly uplifting tale of kindness and humanity in the face of tragedy.
You might expect Come from Away to have a diminishing effect on audiences the further away we get from September 11, 2001. What I experienced at the Palace was the opposite. The audience was mesmerized throughout the performance and on its feet the moment the show ended for an unusually long ovation. There is no doubt that the performances were worthy of the applause, but I believe the audience’s enthusiasm was due even more to the juxtaposition of this story and the divisive nature of the times we’re all living in today.
In Come from Away, we see thousands of people from all over the world converge on a small island, more than doubling the population of Gander without any warning. Most of the travelers don’t know why they have been forced to land until they exit the planes. I was reminded that cell phones were not the commodity in 2001 that they are today, so the priority for most of the passengers was to communicate with their families back home, wherever that might be. The audience becomes involved in each of their personal stories. The frustration they all feel with the lack of information and the uncertainty about when they will be able to leave the island is palpable.
Nothing about the above is unexpected to those of us who experienced and remember many of the same emotions, even here at home. It is therefore surprising when Come from Away becomes a joyful story of new relationships, of selfless hospitality, of humor and music. The audience, in a matter of moments, becomes completely enamored by one story after another of strangers from totally different backgrounds instantly and without hesitation becoming families and friends.
The people of Gander don’t think about where their new guests live, what they look like, how they think, who they love, how they worship, or what they speak. They see hunger, exhaustion, fear and uncertainty. They take them into their homes, share food, drink, showers, clothes, beds, whatever they can think of to make a terrible situation a little more tolerable. Every time one of the passengers expresses gratitude or offers some type of recompense for the kindness of their hosts they receive the same response, “you would do the same for me.”
I pray that the world never again experiences a tragedy like September 11, 2001. But it would do us all well to remember how the world came together that week. Of course, we felt outrage. But even stronger was our desire to reach out, to support each other, to offer whatever we could with compassion, generosity, and kindness. This, more than anything, was worthy of the standing ovation! The audience response was also evidence, once again, of the power and the extraordinary value of the arts in teaching us what really matters.
Stuart Adelberg has a long history of leadership and active involvement in the region’s nonprofit arts and human services community. He enjoys the opportunity provided by Greenwich Sentinel to share his occasional thoughts and observations.
