How do you choose the right words to describe last night's Civic Theatre performance of Come From Away?
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Was it spirited and relatable? Yes. In a way that only a fussy samaritan whispering to a bonobo ever could be.
How about comical and spontaneous? It was both of those things too. Drunkards kissed a fish. A brawny policeman panicked before buying tampons. A gym teacher turned his whistle into the catcall of a lothario.
Even when we all knew that the spirits would darken, that the bar that served them would fall quiet under a spell of terror, we chuckled at these banalities. That we could do this, that we could imagine we were characters in such an unimaginable catastrophe, says something about how immensely gifted this cast proved themselves to be. But it doesn't say everything about what we experienced as an audience last night.
So how do you reduce such a precise portrayal of gritty humanity into just a few words? You could get a sense of what those words could be at the end of the Thursday night show, straight after a standing ovation that has by now become completely routine. There was a reason it was tricky to find your way back to the foyer after the applause. it was because people didn't really want to leave the theatre.
Those that did leave their seats chatted passionately in little clusters, energised by the urges of new ideas. An accomplished local theatre director stayed seated, gazing intently out at the now empty stage, as if by staring she could summons the townsfolk of Gander into an encore. Walking past her were Iain and Julia Campbell, who like the characters we just encountered, landed on that fearful day in Gander themselves.
Moments later, whilst someone else recounted meeting the Mayor of that tiny Newfoundland town, our own Lord Mayor hurried past us, disappearing amidst hundreds of patrons too distracted to recognise her. She could have been in Gander. The Campbells were. But suddenly it didn't matter who was who. We all felt as though we'd just become someone else.
So what was it like to see Come From Away? It was exactly that feeling, the dizzying sense of forgetting where we were by being reminded of who we are. It was vitalising. Enlivening. Those are the words. It was a boot-stomping, fish-kissing, smack-on-the-thigh kind of wake up call from the slumbers of ordinary theatre. It switched from a frivolous hoe-down into a searing ballad, sung by the first American female to ever captain a jumbo. It was an unsentimental musical. That in its itself is a bit of a miracle. Even more than a bonobo giving birth on a frigid rock might be.
As much as flight Captain Beverley Bass (Zoe Gertz) and Mayor of Gander, Claude Elliott (David Silvestri), were the beacons about that outcrop, it was the small crafts, adrift beneath them, that transported us into the broader story.
Which ones did what? All of them appeared to do everything. All at once. The Latino gym teacher (Joe Kosky) appeared and vanished in the burst of a whistle, only to reappear as Oz Fudge, Gander's resident policeman. When he wasn't on duty, buying feminine hygiene products, he was a Polish Jew praying in his yarmulke. Or he was a doctor with a toilet plunger. Or a bus driver. Blink. A frightened passenger stuck on the tarmac. Brilliant.
Kevin J (Joseph Naim) had his own, alienating fears to wrestle with and did so just as deftly. While his boyfriend Kevin T (Douglas Hansell) confidently, yet pointlessly, disguised his sexuality in a borrowed flannelette, his more nervous other half fretted endlessly, a stranger in a welcoming but no less strange town. As an ostracised Muslim, banned from the kitchen and interrogated only for his appearance, Naim was always compelling - an isolated victim of a nation's newborn paranoia.
The harrowing reality of those terrors coming to life was faced graciously by Hannah (Sarah Nairne), a mother whose son's disappearance on September 11 smoldered beneath even the lightest moments of the show. Her deepening friendship with Beulah (Emma Powell) complemented the bond shared between the townsfolk and the passengers who, if it wasn't already clear, were all played by the same dozen performers.
The technical immensities involved in these reversals - from hokey locals to New Yorkers, Texans and urbanes from LA - would have been impressive even without the demands of switching accents. That the dialects turned on a dime alongside the costumes, demeanours, physicalities and delivery of each character was astounding. Much like the passengers integrated into Gander, so did every performer rip the seam out separating one character from the other.
Even the band spent the night hidden in plain view. They too played on a seamless threshold, offstage but obviously crucial to everything on it. At the very end they burst out of their half-disguise, emancipated and celebratory. If they were cheeky enough to sneak back for their own encore, which they probably are, they would have stood before a standing ovation given for only the seven of them.
There aren't many reasons left to praise Christopher Ashley, a director whose precise but expansive vision has brought Come From Away an internationally unanimous acclaim. Yet there are still little stories in his shadows, whispers nearly lost beneath his relentless and boisterous noise. Every thing you encounter in this production is underscored by an obscurity, an intricate texture of otherness. The shift of a chair in the dark. The turning away of a face, a sadness enshadowed by strengths. Blink and you'll miss it.
But do your best not to.
