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This essay unpacks how Come From Away functioned for US audiences by (re) narrativizing the central story of 9/11 as it is commonly understood and moving the subject away from New York. An examination of its musical influences and narrative pacing, as well as critical and audience responses, highlights how the play enacts what Jill Dolan calls "utopian performatives," where audiences can imagine a better world that extends beyond the performance.
In the days after the 9/11 attacks, Time magazine's award-winning issue included an article calling for the "nourishment of rage" and "focused brutality." Columnist Lance Morrow advised that "America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness-and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred."1 This response was one common sentiment circulating as people tried to make sense of the tragedy. More than a decade later, however, there was space for a different approach to understand 9/11 and the musical Come From Away, which looks at events from the perspective of one Canadian town, filled houses as it premiered in cities around the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proudly described Come From Away as "a Canadian musical, written by Canadians, about Canadians. It brought Canadian creativity to Broadway, and showcased the Canadian spirit of compassion, resourcefulness, and generosity."2 By 2018, the show broke records as Broadway's longest running Canadian musical.3 Standing room audiences were the norm until the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly closed the doors of all Broadway theatres on 12 March 2020, exactly three years to the day of the play's official opening. Great distance from the tragedy had to be established before such perspective could be explored, and even then, some resistance to this story remained.
Critic and Newfoundlander Barry Freeman, writing soon before the show's Broadway premiere, anticipated one reason the play would enjoy box office success in New York:
I concede that looking at Come From Away from the Newfoundland perspective is a bit like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. As an expatriate Newfoundlander watching the performance in Toronto, I felt I occupied a strange position as a spectator: the subject but not the subject, the target but not the target. As much as the musical...