On Sunday, in a town of nine thousand on the northeast coast of Newfoundland, Come From Away will play the final performance of its summer run—in Gander, where the story happened.
The same day, in Lower Manhattan, members of its Broadway cast will sing the score at the World Trade Center, steps from where the towers stood.
It's been twenty-five years. Long enough for a musical about that week to be written, workshopped, opened, awarded, toured, closed, and brought home to the town that lived it. And long enough for the people in the seats to change.
That's what I want to sit with this week—how theater carries history, once the people who lived it begin to hand it off.
Welcome to the Rock.
Every high schooler in America was born after the towers fell.
So was every middle schooler. So were most college students. When Come From Away opened on Broadway in 2017, the show could assume its audience remembered. Nine years later, that assumption is dissolving in real time. Every season, the house fills with more people for whom the show is the first telling.
Which means the same hundred minutes are doing two different jobs, in the same room, at the same time. For one seatmate, the show is a reliving: the grounded planes, the jammed phone lines, the week the world stopped. For the seatmate one armrest over, it's an introduction. One of them is grieving. One of them is learning. They're breathing the same air, laughing at the same screech-in, going quiet at the same moment.
I sent my parents to see the show when it was on Broadway. They carried a different September 11 into that theater than I did—I was nine that morning; they were adults with a nine-year-old. Same seats, different remembering. The show made room for all of it.
A documentary plays for whoever presses play, alone on a couch. A play gathers the rememberers and the learners into one room and asks them to feel it together.
The Diary of Anne Frank opened on Broadway in 1955, ten years after she died in Bergen-Belsen.
It won the Pulitzer Prize. And for seventy years it has done something the history books couldn't: it put her voice in a living girl's mouth, in front of a living audience, over and over, in theaters and classrooms and black-box basements. Generations met the Holocaust through Anne first—person before number, attic before archive.
The Laramie Project was built the way Come From Away was built: writers with recorders, listening. Today it's a staple of school theater seasons across the country—staged by students born long after Matthew Shepard died, saying real people's words out loud.
That's the pattern, and it's older than both shows. When we can't bear to forget something, we make it a play. A textbook holds still. A film holds still. A play refuses to exist unless living people gather in a room and do it again—so the remembering has to be re-inhabited, every time, by whoever is alive to do it.
Come From Away joined this lineage before it was a musical at all. In 2011, Irene Sankoff and David Hein flew to Gander for the tenth anniversary, when the plane people came back to say thank you. They stayed, and they listened—interview after interview with the townspeople and the returned passengers. Some of the lyrics are transcripts. The show was an act of listening before it was ever an act of singing.
Nobody remembers September 11. Not all of it.
You remember your piece: one kitchen, one classroom, one tv screen. Human memory doesn't hold events whole—it holds slivers, hard and bright and specific.
Come From Away holds the day the same way. One town. Thirty-eight planes. Five days. Out of the enormity, a sliver—held completely. The show never tries to tell the whole story, because nothing can. And in that, the form and the memory match: a play is built like a memory. Specific, partial, embodied, warm.
That match is what makes the remembering portable. The whole day is too big to hand to a sixteen-year-old. Gander fits: nine thousand people making seven thousand beds.
A sliver, truly held, can somehow encapsulate everything around it. Ask anyone who's seen the show: you leave the theater carrying five days in Newfoundland, and also parts of that day, that time, that the show never depicts.
Some year soon, a sixteen-year-old will stand in a high school gym with a chair, a Newfoundland accent she practiced in her bedroom, and a real person's words about five days she never lived.
It's already how The Laramie Project survives. It's how Anne Frank still speaks. The remembering doesn't stay in the audience forever—eventually it climbs onto the stage. A kid born a decade after 2001 will learn the beats of that week the way actors learn everything: in her body, out loud, with her friends. For a hundred minutes, the history will have her heartbeat.
Every performance is an act of remembering.
That's what it means to never forget.
This week in One Last Thing: what I actually remember from September 11, 2001—all three pieces of it—and why, twenty-five years later, I've been bingeing the documentaries. It's for paid subscribers ($5/month), which keeps The Fourth Wall independent and alive. Either way, I'm grateful you're here.
See you next week ♥️
—Matt
I greatly appreciate you sharing the power of documentary theater.
Of the many beautiful aspects of COME FROM AWAY, this is something often overlooked, but integral to the artistry of the piece. I hold the work of Irene Sankoff and David Hein in the highest regard.
I do the same kind of work. It was an honor of a lifetime for my documentary play, 'The Legacy of Welles Remy Crowther: The Man in the Red Bandanna' to be presented at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in May 2025, marking the 11th anniversary of the dedication. The cast of 15 included Broadway actors, the first responder community, and Boston College. #For Welles.
https://www.911memorial.org/events/live-performance-legacy-welles-remy-crowther
Thank you for your wonderful writing.
Always wonderful to read what you write. And love hearing you sing!! Love you!!