An interview with Irene Sankoff and David Hein, writers of the upcoming Festival show Come From Away, about exploring an unexplored topic, composing a musical inspired by Newfoundland and how the Festival has challenged this writing team.
Come From Away depicts an aspect of 9/11 that is not often focused on. How did you hear about the event in Newfoundland, and what inspired you to write about it?
Irene Sankoff: Our friend Michael Rubinoff (a NAMT member through Sheridan College and the Canadian Music Theatre Project) suggested the idea - and after a quick Google search we found so many articles and news clips that we'd be sitting there for hours looking at them with tears in our eyes. We saw that there were events planned in Newfoundland to commemorate the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, and we noticed many of the people who had been stranded there so unexpectedly were returning to visit the friends that they had made 10 years earlier - and so we decided we had to be there too. We applied for a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to spend close to a month out there - and we got it.
When we arrived everyone was so willing to share their stories with us, and they spoke of one another and their memories with respect and love and gratitude toward the Newfoundlanders for putting them up, feeding them, entertaining them and befriending them during such a terrifying time. It was such a positive response to a hateful act and the people who were there to experience the Newfoundlanders’ hospitality really want this aspect of history to be shared. The stories are not only touching, there are humorous ones, too. At one of the shelters, a local asked a passenger if there was anything she needed - she said "A cup of coffee... and my dog." The local left the shelter and then returned a while later with a cup of coffee and the family's pet dog to keep her company. That's just one story of the many amazing stories we heard...
What is the intended function of the story as a re-telling instead of happening in the present tense?
IS: We were inspired initially by The Laramie Project. Both shows are about a town's response to a tragedy as told through the people who were affected by it. It's important to underline how much the time spent in Newfoundland still resonates with the people who were stranded there after 10 years. And we wanted to relay the stories as much as possible in the way they were told to us.We weren't interested in a fictionalized retelling of history, since what actually happened was so amazing (having said that, we still needed to take thousands of stories from hundreds of people and turn them into a musical, so some of the people we met are merged into one character, and some events that happened we ascribed to different characters, but while it's not a documentary, it's all based on truth). Finally, the story we wanted to tell wasn't just that people were treated incredibly when stranded in Newfoundland—we wanted to show that they and the Newfoundland community were changed by these events—and we felt we could only do that by showing what happened next when the passengers returned home. The town felt emptier and quiet for the first time. And passengers who returned home wrestled with their experience being so different from everyone else's - and they all mourned losing something amazing that they never expected to find. It was really only ten years later, when these groups reunited, that the story finally felt resolved.
The Newfoundland accent is fascinating. What was it like writing for this dialect, and what were your considerations for how quickly an American audience would catch on?
IS: Ow's dat, B'y? Oh, my ducky, the Newfoundland tongue - she's right difficult! But she's a beauty too, B'y!
We were immersed in the dialect while visiting Newfoundland in September 2011, and found some
