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Southern CA July 03, 2001
Charlie Victor
Romeo
Reviewed By Laura
Weinert
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"Charlie Victor Romeo"
Theater:Macgowan Little
Theater, UCLA
Phone:(310)
825-2101
Starts:June 27, 2001
Ends: July 15, 2001
| Formed
using edited transcriptions of black box recordings from
airplanes that have gone down, Charlie Victor Romeo is
documentary theatre at its most gripping, and most studiously
mimetic. Knowing the premise, you might expect to see
harrowing scenes of terror, with pilots contemplating their
last words, shrieking to the gods above, while flight
attendants scurry around a panicked frenzy. Yet what CVR so
beautifully enacts is something outsiders never see behind the
locked cockpit door: extraordinary people doing
extraordinarily difficult work. We don't realize that such
shockingly tragic endings are often preceded by hours of
technical heroism, as pilots cope calmly and successfully--for
a time--with failed engines, malfunctioning flight controls,
incorrect readings.
Until a final split second, these
flight crews are completely absorbed by their rigorous,
impossible jobs, and, it seems, ballasted by something inside
them that believes there's a chance their efforts just might
work. Punctuated by a few four-letter words, their last
utterances are often, in fact, precise instructions or
commands.
Show creators/performers Bob Berger, Patrick
Daniels, and Irving Gregory take an incredible leap of faith
themselves in taking on a subject so steeped in morbidity, and
staging a performance composed largely of technical jargon
that floats loftily above audience's heads. In a sense, the
latter serves to combat the former. The production stages six
actual crash incidents, picking up each scene from the moment
a malfunction occurs, blacking out immediately before the
final collision. Though we know how each scene will end, the
characters' constant tinkering and problem solving draw our
focus toward the specific tasks at hand--coping with a failed
altimeter, the loss of all hydraulic systems, inexplicable
terrain alarms sounding, the danger of stalling--leaving us
little time to contemplate larger questions of our collective
mortality.
All 10 performers carefully avoid melodrama and
cliche, playing numerous roles throughout each brief piece as
pilots, co-pilots, air traffic controllers, and flight
attendants. The tight ensemble, which in addition to creators
includes Michael Bruno, Audrey Crabtree, Dan Krumm, Julia
Randall, Stuart Rudin, Darby Thomson, and Oliver Wyman,
manages to subvert the impulse to create dazzling single
characters in exchange for a more subtle give and take that
spotlights and shades each tense interaction.
Jamie
Mereness' sound design--complemented by live mixing from Jonah
Lawrence and Kevin Reilly--is balanced, intricate, and
painstakingly realistic, from the hushed air-flow sound of the
pressurized cabin, to perfect reproductions of overlapping
voiceovers from air traffic control and systems and
maintenance departments. Set design/adaptation by Daniels,
Bill Ballou, and Cecile Bouchier consists of a brilliantly
suggestive copy of an actual cockpit. While those of us with
an innate fear of flying might be terrified by the mere
premise of such a production, Charlie Victor Romeo is a
rare chance for a glimpse into what it actually means to work
as a pilot, performing a tough, thankless job, using every
ounce of time-earned expertise, and keeping your head and
heart in check when danger strikes at some 10,000 feet in the
air.
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