From The Rink on 9/11 to Come from Away today, Peter reflects on theatre as a place for grief, resilience, and forgiveness.
Written by Peter Rothstein
Last evening I was at an event promoting the arts in Sarasota. I was speaking with a gentleman whose wife was diverted to Newfoundland on 9/11. She was flying from London to Las Vegas when the U.S. airspace closed, and ended up spending five nights sleeping on a church pew at the Salvation Army Camp outside of Gander. She spent those five days working with local pharmacists to coordinate medications for the thousands of passengers who were not allowed to take their luggage off the planes. She had always wanted to be a nurse.
At the event, one of our cast members, the amazing Aléna Waters, sang a song from the show. I noticed the man sitting next to me with tears streaming down his face. He told me he was in the North Tower of the World Trade Center that morning. He made it out of the building. Every day he thinks about those who didn’t.
Everyone seems to have a story about their experience that sunny Tuesday morning, that turned into one of the darkest days in history. I was in Minneapolis getting ready for rehearsal when my phone rang. It was Denise Prosek, the music director for the show I was rehearsing. Denise, who told me to turn on the TV. We both, alone in our apartments, together watched the second plane hit the South Tower.
We decided to go forward with rehearsal that day, I think because neither of us wanted to be alone, and we knew that some of the cast would also want a place to be. We were in rehearsals for The Rink, a rarely produced musical by John Kander, Fred Ebb and fellow Sarasotan, Terrance McNally.
Rehearsing a musical may seem like a rather superficial thing to do on such a tragic occasion — to witness the horrors of that morning and then say, “OK let’s put on our rollerskates and sing.” But I think that is precisely why we are so blessed as theatre artists to do this work. Our daily chores entail empathy and trying to make sense of the human experience. And sometimes we do that singing, dancing, or putting on a pair of rollerskates. The Rink is ultimately a story about forgiveness, and the idea of forgiveness felt like an impossible mountain to climb the Fall of 2001. But that was the task at hand, and I was grateful for it.
Fast forward nearly 25 years — I am in rehearsal for Come from Away and still trying to make sense of it all, trying to comprehend the magnitude of that tragic event. This story begins on September 11th, but it’s ultimately a story about September 12th, about a community who brought light into the darkness, who restored faith in the goodness of people. I believe that’s something to sing about.
