Thursday, October 1, 2026
Clear, 69°Wind: mph,
Welcome to our new web site!
To give our readers a chance to experience all that our new website has to offer, we have made all content freely avaiable, through October 1, 2018.
During this time, print and digital subscribers will not need to log in to view our stories or e-editions.
For five days, the little town of Gander, Newfoundland, underwent a transformation. Its airport was built in an era in which transatlantic flights needed to refuel before continuing across the ocean. By Sept. 11, 2001, it had become largely a quiet reminder of aviation's past. Then, in a matter of hours, it became one of the busiest airports in the world.
Thirty-eight commercial airliners landed on its runways, carrying nearly 7,000 passengers who had expected to be somewhere else entirely. The town itself had only about 9,000 residents.
No one had a plan for what happened next. Schools became shelters. Churches filled with cots. Community centers opened their doors. Residents sorted clothing donations by size, cooked meals, delivered toiletries, found translators, walked dogs, filled prescriptions and, in many cases, handed house keys to people whose names they had learned only hours earlier.
It remains one of those remarkable moments in history when the arithmetic simply didn't seem to work. A town couldn't possibly absorb almost another town's worth of strangers. Until it did.
That story has become the award-winning musical Come From Away, opening this month at Las Cruces Community Theatre. But if director Kat Hadfield has her way, audiences won't leave talking about airplanes or even Sept. 11.
She hopes they leave thinking about strangers.
"I think our world would be such a better place if we were all willing to help strangers," Hadfield said during a recent interview inside the theater. "We'd be able to solve our homeless crisis. We'd be able to solve world hunger if we could lend each other the things that we have."
That idea is why she chose this musical. Her previous production, Cabaret, explored what can happen when fear and intolerance take hold. She wanted this one to explore something else, not because the world has become less complicated, but because she believes audiences also need reminders of what people are capable of when they choose generosity over suspicion.
The musical tells dozens of stories at once. There are airline pilots, stranded passengers, anxious parents, local volunteers and families trying to understand a tragedy unfolding hundreds of miles away. There isn't really a single hero. That's one of the things Hadfield loves most.
"I like that it's about everyone as a collective," she said. "It's about letting go of everyone's egos and being able to work together as a group."
That philosophy isn't confined to the stage.
By profession, Hadfield is an attorney, spending much of her week representing people in criminal defense and family law. It is work that regularly places her alongside people experiencing some of the hardest moments of their lives, and she recognizes something familiar in the people of Gander.
Not perfection, but the power of choice. The choice to meet pain with compassion.
One storyline, in particular, resonates with Hadfield. Two strangers meet in Gander after their flights are diverted. Their relationship eventually becomes a marriage, proof that even in the middle of catastrophe, life has an astonishing way of insisting on hope.
"I deal with people's trauma and tough situations all the time," she said. "It's hard, but I get so much joy and fulfillment out of being able to help people. I think about their story a lot and how you balance the good and the bad and how you can hold those both together at the same time."
Those aren't just ideas she talks about. They're ideas she asked her cast to experience.
Early in rehearsals, before there was much discussion about blocking or choreography, Hadfield asked everyone, from teenagers born after Sept. 11 to cast members who vividly remembered watching the attacks unfold, to tell their own story.
Where were you? What did you remember? How did that day change you? The room became quieter. Nearly everyone cried.
The exercise wasn't intended as therapy. It was an acknowledgment that no audience member will arrive carrying exactly the same memories, and neither would the people telling the story.
For Joy Lightfoot, those memories begin in the Air Force. She and the man who would later become her husband had just finished an overnight shift when the attacks occurred. Instead of heading back into their normal routine, they spent the next several days largely confined by military security restrictions, waiting for instructions and trying to make sense of events with very little information.
She remembers feeling helpless.
Eventually, needing simply to leave the house, she secured permission from her commander and invited fellow Air Force crew member Charles to dinner and a movie. It became their first date. They've now been married for 22 years.
It's a wonderful story, but it isn't the story she thinks about when she walks on stage each night.
Playing Beulah, one of the Newfoundlanders opening her community to frightened travelers, has become a chance to imagine another version of those days.
"I'm kind of living vicariously through my character," Lightfoot said. "That's what I wish I would've been doing, something to help."
For other reasons, Lightfoot finds herself drawn to the airline captain in the story, Beverly Bass.
“She wants to get to her job she wants to get going and she's completely being told to hurry up and wait, which is a very military thing, so I can relate to her a lot,” Lightfoot said. “I can imagine the way that she's feeling, that I've got a job that needs to get done and she's talking about her equipment, planes are meant to be in the air, they're not meant to just be sitting, so I can relate to her stress.”
Perhaps that's why Come From Away continues to find audiences nearly 25 years after the attacks. From the cast to the audience, we all see something different, and it moves us.
Time has not erased what happened on Sept. 11. But time has quietly allowed another story to fade into the background. The one about a town that looked at thousands of frightened strangers and saw neighbors instead.
That's the story Kat Hadfield wants to tell. Not because it changes history, but because, in a world that often feels every bit as divided as the one she sees outside the theater doors, she believes it still has the power to change us.
