Uniting Over Grief in the Aftermath of the Pan Am 103 Tragedy

Amy Engelhardt in Impact. Photo by Peter Sirocki.

We have all experienced, or know someone who has experienced, a senseless act of terrorism or tragedy. Whether it was 9/11, some other horrific event around the world, or a personal catastrophe, it changes us for life. But playwright/composer/lyricist/performer Amy Engelhardt wants to prove that there is light at the end of the darkness.

Amy Engelhardt’s Impact follows an event that personally impacted her life, and the lives of many others. In December 1988, 243 passengers and sixteen crew members died in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, including thirty-five Syracuse University students. Engelhardt had recently graduated from Syracuse University, and at the time, she was attending grad school at the Berklee College of Music. She was in Boston and entering the subway when she saw the cover of the New York Post inside a vending machine. There was a photo of Nicole Boulanger’s mother, one of the Syracuse University students who had been killed in the attack, on the floor of JFK airport, screaming, “Not my baby.”

Engelhardt later found out five students who had been killed had been her own classmates, including Boulanger. It was a moment in history that had an impact on the rest of her life.

Thirty years later, after she accepted work for Amazon Prime Video’s Good Omens, she traveled to London for a premiere, and decided to plan a tandem trip to Lockerbie from there to visit the site of the plane crash. She put a message out on a Syracuse University alumni Facebook page to see if anyone wanted to join her, and she was surprised by who reached out. Nicole Boulanger’s best friend and sister reached out to join Engelhardt. It was this trip that inspired the idea for her play Impact. “What started out as a bucket-list trip became a life-changing exploration of community, compassion and kindness,” she says.

Photo by Alex Stein.

Impact will be performed as part of The Wilbury Theatre Group’s Providence Fringe Festival on Thurs., July 18, at 7 p.m., Fri., July 19 at 7 p.m., and Sat., July 20, at 5 p.m. at the theater inside the WaterFire Arts Center. The show involves music, multimedia and memory, and includes the telling of Engelhardt’s unique story alongside music from local cellist Isabel Castellvi and percussionist Riccardo Pearlman. It was previously performed at Edinburgh Fringe and festivals in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. The performance was incubated at the cell theatre in NYC and directed by Kira Simring, and won the Jury Prize for Best Score at the National Women’s Theatre Festival.

Engelhardt’s one-woman show confronts the mysterious personal connections that occurred around the Pan Am 103 tragedy. “The show traces all of the events and weird magical coincidences — I call them thin moments, it’s a Celtic term — and all these things about Lockerbie that started popping up in my life, thirty years later,” Engelhardt says.

When Engelhardt first put up the Facebook post seeking travel companions, the people who responded were so deeply connected. Nicole Boulanger’s best friend and sister accompanied her on the journey, and it just so happened that Nicole’s funeral had been the only one Engelhardt had been able to attend for any of the victims. She learned so much on that trip, especially about how beautiful and kind people can be, especially the residents of Lockerbie. She even stayed with a former police officer, who had been one of the first people on the scene of the plane crash, and she connected with the woman who found Boulanger’s purse in her yard the morning after the tragedy.

“What I expected was this somber, sober trip, and that’s not what I got. I went with two women I barely knew, who I had connected with on Facebook for whom this trip was extremely meaningful. They were way closer to it than I was,” Engelhardt says. “The people who responded, without knowing this backstory of mine, were Nicole’s best friend, and as it turned out, Nicole’s sister, who had never been on a plane. And it wasn’t lost on me that a project called Good Omens was taking me there.”

Engelhardt planned to take the trip because she saw so many others posting about their own visits and how it was healing for them. “For a person who talks a lot, I didn’t say much that entire trip. Because it wasn’t about me, it was about taking it all in and being there for the people I was with,” she says. “And it was absolutely beautiful. We’re at this time now, where we can take something amazing from that, especially after what we’ve all been through. Everyone knows someone, or is someone, who is connected to some kind of tragedy, whether it’s 9/11, Lockerbie, school shootings, COVID-19, things that were intentional or unintentional. The show is about the power of kindness and humanity. It’s not a grief parade.”

Engelhardt hopes that people will see Impact and realize that humanity is still alive and well, despite all the horrors of the world. “It’s a renewal of hope in humanity, no matter what your positions on anything are. It’s a completely unpolitical show,” she says. “There is literally no politics in it. I don’t go into the aftermath or trial because that’s not what this is about. It’s about my experience over time and these beautiful people. It’s about what we can all do for each other in the most difficult of times.”

Tickets $15 at fringepvd.org/impact.html.