LI passengers stranded on 9/11 attend Northport show depicting kindness they were shown in Newfoundland

Flying home from a wedding in Ireland, Chris Maxwell, Paul Novak, and nearly 7,000 other passengers aboard 38 planes were forced to land at Gander International Airport on the Canadian island province of Newfoundland and Labrador on Sept. 11, 2001.

On the 24th anniversary of that day, in which terrorists hijacked planes and attacked the United States, the Long Island duo watched the inaugural performance of "Come From Away" at the packed 400-seat John W. Engeman Theater in Northport. The Tony Award-winning musical — the Northport theater’s 100th stage production, which will run through Oct. 26 — recounts their experiences of meeting Gander residents who not only gave them food, clothes and essentials over the next several days, but welcomed elderly passengers into their homes.

"We didn’t want to tell a 9/11 story; we wanted to tell a 9/12 story," said playwright David Heim, who co-wrote "Come From Away" with his wife, Irene Sankoff. "This is a story about what happened afterward ... It reminds us every day that there are good people in the world."

While Thursday marked Novak’s first time experiencing "Come From Away," Maxwell saw the original Broadway production in 2017, during which he said: "I had tears in my eyes."

"Being there [Thursday] night, it just feels like it was yesterday," Maxwell, 56, of Huntington, said after watching the Northport production. "It just brings back memories. The songs, just listening to the words, it’s exactly what happened up there, they nailed it. It was phenomenal."

Visitors from the north

Joining Long Islanders for the Engeman production was a trio of Canadians — Heim; Tom Clark, consul general of Canada to New York; and Claude Elliott, who served as mayor of Gander when Maxwell and Novak landed in his community.

"It’s nice to be here to pay tribute" to Long Islanders who died in the terror attacks "and to remind people this play is about generosity and kindness," said Elliott, who is depicted in the play. "We need more of that in our world today."

The stars of the Northport production agreed.

"I think we’re in a moment right now in our country where everything is set up to be divisive, and set up to show ‘them’ and ‘us,’ " Christina DeCicco, 44, of Rockville Centre, said. The actor portrays Beverley Bass, the first female captain for American Airlines, who piloted one of the planes diverted to Gander.

"Even though we are so different, we’re all humans and the best part of us ... is how we can take care of each other," DeCicco added. "It doesn’t matter where we are coming from, what our beliefs are, we still can take care of each other."

A remembrance ceremony that included a video presentation of the names and photographs of the 43 Town of Huntington residents who were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks preceded the performance Thursday evening. The musical performance that followed was about "responding to darkness with light" on Sept. 12 and the days that followed, Heim said, standing on the theater set modeled after a bar in Gander.

Stranded, but in good hands

After an announcement rang throughout their flight that "we are leaving U.S. airspace," Novak, 64, of Montauk, recalled feeling nervous as his plane circled Montreal before air traffic controllers "redirected us up to Gander," on that sunny morning in 2001.

"They brought us through customs, and the people of Gander were waiting there with bags of food, care bags with T-shirts," Novak recalled.

After taking a shuttle to an Elks lodge where they spent several days, Maxwell, Novak and around 180 of the nearly 7,000 passengers who descended upon Gander finally saw television news reports that explained their predicament.

"It was silence," Maxwell recalled of the moment the group learned of the terror attacks. "I don’t think anybody could believe it. Some people started crying."

The two men decided to go for a walk and stumbled upon a Mexican restaurant.

"It was midnight or 1 a.m., normally they would be closed, but they said they kept everything open for us," Novak recalled. "They said, ‘If you want to stay here, you can sleep in the booths. We’ll get you anything you want.’ They didn’t charge us for anything."

The kindness continued for the passenger’s nearly weeklong Canadian visit. Residents welcomed elderly passengers into their homes to sleep more comfortably than they would on the floor or on a cot at the Elks lodge. Others brought "breakfast, lunch and dinner" to the passengers every day, Maxwell recalled.

"You can’t even say ‘thank you,’ it’s not enough; there’s no word really for what they had done," he added. “ I don’t know if that would happen anywhere else in the world."