Come From Away

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
folks were easier to understand than others! We missed the punch line of many jokes because when the locals got together they would speak faster and faster as they got excited, and once a joke landed they would look at us expectantly and we would just stare back blankly! We recorded a lot of verbatim interviews and we also got ourselves a copy of the Newfoundland Dictionary. We tried to keep speech patterns and figures of speech as intact as possible, and while workshopping made changes to clarify intent if people were confused. What’s emerged still represents the richness of the language, but doesn’t lose anyone along the way.

What cultural aspects of Newfoundland informed the musical composition? Were you aiming for a specific genre of music or did each song evolve from a different musical style?

IS: Newfoundlanders told us that at least one person in every house plays an instrument and David grew up on

East Coast music and folk festivals. He couldn’t wait to start composing for a bodhran (a hand drum), accordion, fiddle, penny whistle and ugly stick (basically a stick stuck in a boot with bottle caps screwed into it…no, really). But along the way, we got really excited about trying to represent through music what happened in Newfoundland over those five days – a merging of cultures from around the world over top of a base of Newfoundland folk. For passengers who came from Moldova, we listened to Russian and Moldovan music. For passengers who came from Texas, we listened to country rock.  We added African percussion for passengers from there and somehow we found common denominators to create a musical metaphor for the world coming together.

One of your main characters is American Airlines captain Beverley Bass, the first female captain of a commercial airline. What was it like writing a character with such real-life historic import?

IS: We are in awe of Beverley! She told us that as she was growing up she had no understanding of sexism, so when she decided at a very young age she wanted to be a pilot, she saw no reason why she couldn’t become one. It’s amusing that even in 2013 people assume that she’s a flight attendant until the script reveals otherwise. Women especially respond to Beverley’s song in the second act detailing what flying means to her and how she got where she is today – lyrics which were very close to the verbatim story that she told us herself. Beverley is a huge supporter of us and fan of the show – she just sent our new baby daughter an adorable welcome gift and she’s constantly cheering us on over Facebook! We have shared the music with her as the show has developed, and she saw a live streaming of the show as it was performed in Canada from her home in Texas! Beverley, like many of the people we spoke to, continues to keep in touch with us and follow the show’s development. In fact, we might have a couple special guests at NAMT!

When you two work together do you more or less stick to respective categories as book writer or composer, or do you both dabble in everything? 

David Hein: We write everything together – book, music, and lyrics – although since I used to be a singer/songwriter, I tend to start the songs and write the majority of the music – but by the end, we can barely remember who wrote what. We each work in different ways. I tend to slap things on a blank page and Irene goes in to refine them, and what follows is usually hours of conversation and debate before anything else goes down on the page.

Has the Festival process presented any challenges or elucidated anything for you about Come From Away?

DH: What challenges HASN’T it presented? From script cutting, to finding our newborn daughter a passport, to casting from Canada via google and youtube…but despite all that, the NAMT staff, our advisors, and our director and music director have really shared the workload, and really jumped in when Irene gave birth at the beginning of August, which has made it a completely wonderful experience. From a script and music perspective, it’s really forced us to take a step back and look at what’s essential to our piece – which is wonderful, because one of our challenges was that we felt our Act 1 was a little long. Fitting it into a 45-minute reading required tweaking each line and really being economical, and we’ve had to kill some of our darlings, but we feel like we’ve made it leaner and faster in the process. Having said that, some of our favorite stories and songs are in Act. 2, or have ended up on the NAMT cutting room floor… but we’re crossing our fingers that this isn’t the last time we’ll see them!

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A guest blog entry from Irene Sankoff, writer of Come From Away to be presented at this year’s Festival of New Musicals.  
On August 6th, I delivered a brand new production that my husband and co-author, David Hein, and I had been working on for nine months. At 6 lbs, 1 ounce, she was heavier than most of our scripts (although nowhere near if you counted every draft). The delivery took 37 hours, but thanks to a crazy rotating team of doctors, nurses, residents, doulas and David, trying (in vain) to look calm and distract me by reading all the parts from Peter And The Starcatcher, opening night was (relatively) painless. We named her Molly.
Two days later, with a newborn in one hand and a keyboard in another – with the wi-fi password from Mt. Sinai hospital – we delivered the NAMT Act One 45-minute cut of our musical, Come From Away: Molly’s sibling. This cut and the entire presentation at NAMT took no less of a stellar team of professionals to accompany its birth.
We’d been working on Come From Away for longer than nine months – we started writing it in 2011, when we traveled out to Newfoundland to research it. Come From Away tells the true story of when thousands of international residents were stranded in a tiny, Canadian community in Newfoundland – and how the experience changed the lives of the passengers and the people there. It’s an inspiring story of cross-border collaboration during an international tragedy. We spent almost a month out in Newfoundland interviewing countless passengers, flight crew, locals and more. We returned home, continued to interview people across the world over Skype and then finally started putting the pieces together in workshops at Sheridan College’s Canadian Musical Theatre Project and then at Goodspeed Musicals’ Festival of New Artists. Then we got the incredible honor of being accepted into NAMT’s Festival… and did I mention I had just discovered through a series of (not so) subtle signs and discomforts that I was pregnant?
As Canadian playwrights, we don’t know many people in the New York Theatre world, so we considered it good fortune when
we knew at least one of our NAMT advisors – Bob Alwine from Goodspeed. Bob is awesome. Not only had he welcomed us warmly to Goodspeed’s Festival earlier this year, but he had traveled to a different country to see our show’s continued growth at Sheridan’s Canadian Musical Theatre Project. Bob’s great and knows our show inside out. Lucky Canadian playwrights.
Dana Harrel from La Jolla Playhouse was a complete stranger though and we still have only talked to her on the phone (we only figured out 2 calls later that “Dana” is pronounced “Donna”). She’d never seen our show or knew us from Adam, but to quote a lyric from our show, she “jumped right in with both feet tied.” Our first conversation with Bob, Dana and Branden from NAMT was incredibly exciting – tossing ideas around and getting feedback from people who had been developing incredible theatre for years. Near the end of the conversation we nervously mentioned that we would get totally derailed from the process by our third co-writer’s arrival, somewhere around Aug. 14 – two months before the festival. Dana, a mother herself, told us that she also had put on a show with a ONE-month old! She promised she would be “an overbearing mother” to me, that she would help us with whatever we needed, baby stuff, babysitting, etc. but she couldn’t promise that we wouldn’t be exhausted. And she said it was completely worth it. Lucky lucky Canadian playwrights.
As the process continued, we added more team members: Brian Hill (of Bartram & Hill fame) came on board. Brian had directed the workshops at Sheridan and Goodspeed and his show, The Story of My Life, was also part of the NAMT Festival in 2007. Bob made it possible for Dan Pardo, our music director at Goodspeed, to join us. Michael Rubinoff, our terrific producer at Sheridan checked in and advised every other day. Michael originally suggested the idea for the show, and since it was the first show in The Canadian Musical Theatre Project, I think he feels kind of fatherly about the show. Robb Nanus, our NAMT line producer, and John Michael Crotty, our stage manager, hopped on board. Every day our team grew larger – and then we started casting.
Bob, Dana, Branden, Brian and Michael all threw a million suggestions into the hat. Again, being Canadian, we barely recognized most of the names, so every night was spent googling and youtubing each actor – all incredible performers that we could only dream of working with. Bob and Dana, having worked with what seemed like EVERY actor at Goodspeed and La Jolla, had an encyclopedic list of amazing actors. Meanwhile, we kept refining the script, developing our demo recordings, choosing band members, re-orchestrating, sending out invitations – all the while going to prenatal classes and installing baby gates. But we still had plenty of time to get it all done before my Aug. 14th delivery date…until my water broke on Aug. 4.
We sent out a mass email, volunteering our director to take charge of the casting process (thank you again, Brian!), and our wonderful advisers  Bob and Dana, also sprang into action. FYI, show updates are a great distraction from labor pain. We spent the next ten days or so in two hospitals (welcome to Canadian healthcare!). Molly was perfect, but they wanted to run tests and keep an eye on her. And our team didn’t bat an eye, continuing to put together an incredible band and cast.
As I type this, Molly is lying on one side of me on our couch and David is next to me typing on his computer on the other. We are book-ended by our cats. In the past couple weeks a succession of family and friends have paraded through, helping us with everything from dinner to diapers. It truly takes a village to raise a child.
And the same can be said for a NAMT show – and especially for this show about cross-border collaboration. We’ve been blessed to have so many wonderful (former) strangers donating their time and passion to our show. Come From Away is about Canadians and Americans coming together to create something magical – and the story behind the show’s development is the same. Bob just wrote to confirm a casting question we had. Dana, who worked on the true stories behind Hands On A Hardbody, is helping us with waivers for the people we interviewed. Emails come in literally every day from Branden, Robb, Brian, Dan and John.
 
Lucky lucky lucky Canadian playwrights. 

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