Come From Away, about a small town in Newfoundland that takes in stranded passengers when US airspace is shut down after 9/11, is a deceptively affecting piece that weights its unassuming premise with a kind of sleight of emotional transference. So I found myself, unexpectedly, crying within the first twenty minutes of the performance. Based on what I’d heard about the show, I’d thought that the emotional valence would be about welcoming the stranger (which may not be surprising, I suppose – our culture does tend to interpret every story through contemporary politics). And on the surface, that is what it’s about. But the gravity of the show is all about people processing mass tragedy.
Art that deals with mass tragedy has a tradeoff to make. It can hover directly over the tragedy, and that can give the audience a real perspective of what happened and what it was like to be there, which is vital. But it also shuts us down emotionally. Watching a mass tragedy occur, the scale of loss is inhuman, numbing, emotionally inaccessible to us. Our animal brains know very well that when you see a cloud of ash sweep across a city like the fist of God swallowing people whole (or a gas chamber in Germany, or a machete genocide in Rwanda) that this is not a time or place to access our feelings. This is a time to run. Our other systems shut down. The fully engaged audience comes out battered, but not necessarily enlightened or cathartic.
To offer catharsis about a mass tragedy, focus just to the left of the tragedy itself. A rural town in Newfoundland, just turning on the news (the abandoned building where the pianist discovers a piano that he can’t yet play, the hotel in Hotel Rwanda, etc.). You take the audience someplace safe. And then you give them a smaller, more human-scale drama onto which they might project all of the feelings that inform that day, about which they can’t directly speak, because that surrogate of the experience is what we need to process it.
A less emotionally intelligent show, for example, might give you a glimpse into what was happening in New York on that day, just to set the context. But Manhattan doesn’t appear in Come From Away. With a conspicuous discipline, what happened there is not even spoken of. We see people turning the radio on. And then, with ashen faces, telling other people to turn the radio on. When the passengers disembark the plane at nightfall and ask the woman running the shelter finally what happened, she struggles to find the words, and then tells them that the televisions are on in the cafeteria. They can see for themselves.
In any other context – say, an airline goes bankrupt in midflight – the spectacle of a few dozen planes full of international strangers without a common language and a crate full of animals plus a rare pregnant baboon touching down in a rural backwater where everyone has to run in circles to find food and toiletries is a setup for a comedy. What happens to these stranded people for five days doesn’t particularly matter in any material sense. Whether the Newfoundlanders, in a vacuum, are hospitable or a bit prickish isn’t that important, because we know that on most days the world is full of casual indecencies and we probably wouldn’t believe a fairy tale about general Canadian saintliness anyways. But on 9/11, as everyone getting off that plane and everyone on the ground is struggling to come to terms with an act of mass inhumanity just a few hours away, the tiny trials of this nowheresville becomes weighted with processing that trauma. And suddenly, whether everyone gets hot showers deeply matters. Whether people give up their barbecues to the community center is important. Whether somebody goes into the cargo hold and makes sure the cats are fed is paramount – because however morally insignificant these particular passengers are over a given five-day layover, it is the sharp insistence on decency and order and kindness that we need to see, regardless of who receives it or how effective it is or whether the world is really any better for it. We need to believe that these forces respond when they’re affronted, whether they can heal Manhattan or only make tea for group of inconvenienced strangers. We need that insistence for its own sake.
In that sense, I think Come From Away could have been about anywhere and maintained resonance. And whether the folk who touched down in Iceland were greeted with cocoa or forgotten at the airport, the emotional heft of that story, about people trying to come to terms with how to respond in all the little ways that affirm or deny their humanity in the days after a traumatic event, would be intact. That’s the sucker punch that I didn’t quite expect walking into the theatre, focused on the foreground of the story. Just watching people probe their humanity in the shadow of that trauma makes you realize what that trauma really meant.