Lisa Ann Goldsmith Goes to Gander, Drew Leigh Williams Voices Pioneering Captain, as Front Porch Theatricals Production Honors 25th Anniversary of 9/11
By SHARON EBERSON
Lisa Ann Goldsmith was “a plane person” on September 11, 2001, bound from Ohio for her home in New York. Drew Leigh Williams was in a rural PA high school, near the state capital in Harrisburg, when airplanes began crashing into buildings in New York and Washington, D.C., and a field in Somerset County.
With the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks almost upon us, the musical Come From Away is a reminder that, amid the devastation and trauma, there also were generosity and kindness at work. On that day and for several days thereafter, airspace in the United States was closed, leading to thousands of airplane passengers grounded in the small Canadian town of Gander, in the province of Newfoundland (pronounced NEW-fin-land) and Labrador, where they were fed, clothed, and embraced.
For Front Porch Theatrical’s upcoming production of Come From Away, Goldsmith plays the role of Beulah Davis, a composite of real-life residents Beulah Cooper and Diane Davis. Williams will don the uniform of the pioneering American Airlines pilot, Captain Beverly Bass.
“I think it’s very easy to remember and focus on the tragedy and the grief and the loss,” Williams said. “But what this story shines a light on is, how people responded to crises. So to do this story now is even more important, because we are in a climate right now where we need community.”
The musical by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, who interviewed dozens of passengers, crew and residents, squeezes myriad experiences through the lens of one diverted plane’s occupants.
“I think this country needs this show right now because, where is the compassion and the kindness? It’s certainly not coming from [the current administration],” said Goldsmith.
As the production’s dialect coach, she is acutely aware of the nationalities encompassed in the musical.
“It’s not just Newfoundland, which, FYI, is one of the hardest dialects there is. But there’s also German, there’s French, and there’s Texas. There’s a British guy. And there’s Brooklyn, and there’s a Ugandan dialect and there’s an Egyptian Arabic dialect,” she said.
(Courtesy of Lisa Ann Goldsmith)
OH, CANADA: GOLDSMITH IN GANDER
To play a Newfoundlander, Goldsmith took her research to the source, or rather, sources.
“I’d always been interested in going to Nova Scotia and Labrador, that whole area,” Goldsmith said. “And when I got cast in it, I was like, wait, now we have to go. And I have a friend who was an original investor, and he connected me with Diane Davis, who’s one half of my character.”
That started a Facebook friendship that led to Davis giving instructions for Goldsmith and her partner’s visit. “Rent your car now!,” she was told.
Gander has become quite the attraction since the musical became a seven-time Tony Award-nominated show, followed by a national tour and a pro shot streamed by Apple TV.
Davis connected Goldsmith with Cooper and others, including former Appleton Mayor Derm Flynn, and Bonnie Harris, the head of the local Gander SPCA, who looked after many of the animals who were aboard the 75 planes that landed on Newfoundland 25 years ago. Gander International Airport received 38 diverted commercial airliners carrying more than 6,000 passengers and crew. The population of Gander at the time was under 10,000.
During Goldsmith’s five days in the area, she met Beulah Cooper at the Royal Canadian Legion Hall that was used as a shelter for the passengers, a place where “they still do all of these amazing things for people.” The next day, Goldsmith was treated to “Diane Davis’s famous airport tour … S he told me the whole story about that day, and that week.”
To know Goldsmith is to know that she is an animal lover, so of course she visited the local SPCA. Among the souvenirs she brought back was given to her by Bonnie Harris, a paw made of resin – one for her, and one for choreographer Mandy Patsy, who plays Harris in the show.
“I gave it to Mandy on our second day of rehearsal, and, this makes me cry, she keeps it in her pocket every night,” Goldsmieth said.
Her trip ended just before she had the opportunity to connect with another Pittsburgh, Melessie Clark, who was in the cast of a production of Come From Away in Gander.
“She’s there all summer, and I told everybody, ‘This is my friend Melessie. You’re going to love her,” Goldsmith said.
WILLIAMS, ‘ME AND THE SKY’
Perhaps the best known song in Come From Away is “Me and the Sky,” sung as an autobiographical account of Texan Beverley Bass. The inspiring lyrics include how she overcame bigotry to become the first female American Airlines pilot, before the weaponization of airplanes on 9/11 devastated her.
Williams got to know Bass through the video footage and many articles about her.
“You get to really look at yourself personally through her, because of her perseverance, and because of her being this trailblazer, breaking all of these barriers in such a male-dominated profession,” Williams said. “There’s such a sense of pride of being able to step into her shoes, of wanting to live vicariously through her, of all of those obstacles that she overcame.”
Among the media accounts and interviews, Williams said a detail in one story stood out, as a sign of the pilot’s leadership.
“The minute that she got word [of the terrorist attacks], she wrote down what she was going to say to her passengers, and she ran it through her lead flight attendant first,” Williams recounted. “That struck me so much as being a collaborative person that is truly putting others first, because through the commotion and chaos, that lead flight attendant is the one that is directly having to deal with the passengers.”
Williams saw that decision as an example that Bass was “Selfless, selfless, selfless. She’s making sure that everybody else is OK and comfortable before she takes an introspective look on how she’s feeling. And that is just a wonderful person to play. It’s a reminder of how we should lead every day.”
GOLDSMITH: ‘A PLANE PERSON’ ON 9/11
For Goldsmith, what the people of Newfoundland did for the grounded passengers is a reminder of her own experience.
“The reason that this show is so cathartic and important to me is that on 9/11, I was in an airplane coming back from my Lady Macbeth callback at Human Race Theatre Company in Ohio. We were less than 10 minutes from [New York’s] LaGuardia Airport, when the first tower was hit,” Goldsmith recalled. “So I was a plane person. They turned us around, and they eventually sent us back to Cleveland.”
After the plane was kept on the tarmac for three hours, it finally returned to a gate. Goldsmith was among the lucky passengers, in that “my mother was an overprotective Jewish mother, so I had a cell phone.”
Once her mother was assured her daughter was safe, Goldsmith called a friend in Brooklyn.
“I was on the phone with her, she watched the second tower go down, and I’m telling this to the people on the plane, because not a lot of people had cell phones.”
Once inside the airport, everyone was told to get their luggage and leave, with no instructions about where to go or what to do.
“So I saw a news van, and I made a beeline for ir, and I said, “Hello. I’m Lisa Ann Goldsmith. I’m a New Yorker. I just got off a plane. I was 10 minutes from LaGuardia. You can interview me. You can interview anybody I know, but I’m staying with you.’ Because then I’d know what was happening. And I was with them until that evening.”
The reporter offered Goldsmith a place to stay, but she opted for a hotel room at the airport, where she stayed for two days, “not sleeping, not eating, just watching TV. And I had this weird kind of survivor guilt because that’s home. I remember when they were built, and you’d come out of the subway and you’d be like, ‘Where am I? Oh, there’s The Towers. That side.’ ”
WILLIAMS: IT WAS NOT ‘A HAZY FEVER DREAM’
Williams was in a high school study hall that morning, when teachers were told to turn on all televisions.
“And so they were broadcasting that morning the footage of the first tower being hit,” Williams recalled. “And then we all watched the second tower. And I just remember, I looked to my friend immediately and I just said, ‘Are we going to die?’ Because then more and more news started pouring in.”
Williams had been to New York City at least twice a year since the age of 8, recalling that her mother eagerly immersed her in the Broadway shows that were already important to her.
“So I just remember seeing this havoc and devastation happen live. … I’d never felt such impending doom before. At first, everyone thought it was an accident. Remember that? Watching Regis and Kelly? And then all of a sudden, it starts to just wash over folks’ faces that this was intentional.”
At the time, Williams was attending an arts magnet school in Harrisburg, but her parents felt she should not be anywhere near a state capital. They also were relatively close to the field where the Flight 93 Memorial now stands.
“I feel like there’s so many moments in life where it is almost like this hazy fever dream,” Williams said. “That was not hazy.”
What Come From Away accomplishes, she added, is a feeling of hope, “Because just in that moment back in sophomore year, we were dismissed from school because we were feeling devastated and terrified, and so ignorant and curious in a very fearful way. We didn’t know a lot of the stories of these good-deed-doers until Come From Away.“
‘COME FROM AWAY’ ARRIVES AT FRONT PORCH
Before the Front Porch production, Goldsmith had listened to the cast album, but had avoided seeing the show.
“When I started preparing for the audition and I watched it on TV, it brought all of this stuff up that I had pushed to the back for a really long time,” she said.
She has since seen other productions, in Denver and in Halifax. As soon as the rights became available, regional companies like Front Porch tried to be first in line for them.
“Besides the fact that the show is highly emotional, it’s also the hardest show I think I’ve ever done. And [director Aaron Galligan-Stierle] is just brilliant. He and Mandy are doing it the right way, but it’s so intricate, movement to movement.”
Williams, a go-to vocalist who starred in Fun Home for Front Porch, has not been seen on stage much lately, although she was featured in the Pittsburgh CLO 80th Anniversary Concert. When she does work these days, “it’s dependent on the company.”
“Front Porch Theatricals does an amazing job at choosing schedules that work well for people who want to have that sort of balance,” she said of a company that employs only local performers. “And they also do the shows that I want to do.”
Come From Away was always on her “must do” list.
“I always said, I don’t care who, I don’t care what, but I have to be a part of this show,” Williams said. I think that’s where I’m at right now, is I’m looking for those pieces that make me feel that way and make me feel like these are stories that absolutely need to be told, that have prescient themes. And if it is also a schedule that works with mine.”
For Goldsmith, Come From Away has already lived up to a travel experience that left her saying, “I didn’t know how I would ever leave.”
She knew she was in the right place when Diane Davis greeted her wearing a T-shirt that summed up the people of Gander. The tee was emblazoned with a Canadian maple leaf, surrounded by the words, “Relentless Decency.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Front Porch Theatricals production of Come From Away is at the New Hazlett Theatre, 6 Allegheny Square E., North Side, August 14-23, 2026. Tickets: https://www.frontporchpgh.com/.
Categories: Our Posts, Show Previews
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