Friday, June 29, 2001 | Print this story

Horror, Taken to a Higher Level
'Charlie Victor Romeo' draws its thrills from real-life air disasters.

By MICHAEL PHILLIPS, Times Theater Critic

    As pop culture audiences, we're conditioned to enjoy our thrills with a little fake blood, along with a pressure-releasing sense of catharsis.
     "Charlie Victor Romeo" is different. It is a genuine theatrical white knuckler, a documentary drama that grinds your guts without getting cheap about it.
     For this real-life assignment, the show's eight performers necessarily resist the temptation to pump things up or break a sweat. That is, until sweat's called for, meaning once the various aircraft crew members depicted--in six separate aviation disasters occurring between 1985 and 1996--realized what was happening to their plane.
     The 75-minute show, created by members of the New York-based Collective: Unconscious, is in UCLA's Macgowan Little Theater. It's the right-sized space for this unnerving enterprise. In the worst and best way, you're in the cockpit, observing stress indicators both mechanical and human.
     Co-creators Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels and Irving Gregory fashioned the material from black-box recordings recovered after airplane crashes. These cockpit voice recorder (CVR) transcripts make for eerily matter-of-fact drama. When you hear such words as, "Might just get a little choppy," or, "We have control problems," the power of understatement is reaffirmed.
     At the beginning of each disaster depicted, we're shown a black-and-white slide above the stage, detailing the aircraft involved, the location and the cause of the accident we're about to witness. Incorrect altimeter setting. Multiple bird strikes. Catastrophic rupture, aft bulkhead.
     Then, after each of the six vignettes comes to a harrowing close (blackout upon impact), we're shown a second slide. How many lived? How many died?
     "Charlie Victor Romeo" is unlikely to become a holiday perennial on the order of "A Christmas Carol." Even in its particular genre it's rough stuff. Most docu-plays, from Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992," to "The Laramie Project," derive their documentary status from hours and hours of interviews. Those interview subjects are then spliced and juxtaposed collage-style, often for maximum poetic contrast.
     By design "CVR" is less artful, with the conscious exception of Jamie Mereness' sound design, a fine melange of found and created aural tension builders.
     The show does, however, offer surprisingly variegated forms of dread and gallows humor. In some instances, talk of mechanical trouble or bad weather is preceded by much jokey small talk. Other vignettes, chiefly Aeroperu Flight 603 (70 fatalities), operate as symphonies of high panic. A 1995 Alaska crash, owing to Canada geese, has the rhythm and punch of a blackout sketch--10 seconds of calm, and then trouble.
     The final piece locates a different and, I think, richer brand of dread. The 1989 crash of United Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa, left 111 dead but many more alive, thanks to a coolheaded crew coping with engine failure. This is a longer, more intriguing mini-drama, with especially fine work from Stuart Rudin, whose every "uh" and line reading deflects melodrama.
     For all its veracity and leanness of purpose, "CVR" has a certain sideshow quality. (Also, at times, you notice that the actors are making eye contact with each other more often than their real-life counterparts probably did.) Plane crashes have a horrible universality in their favor, if "favor" is the right word. Since many of us fly at least now and then, we have a firsthand chance to mull over various worst-case scenarios, in between pretzels.
     This show presents a half-dozen worst cases. But in the black-box details of what was said, and how, there is a kind of stark poetry after all.
     "Fictitious! It's totally fictitious!" says one pilot, in the throes of a busted control panel. "CVR" is one nail biter with facts on its side.
     * "Charlie Victor Romeo," Macgowan Little Theater, UCLA campus, near Sunset Boulevard at Hilgard Avenue, Westwood. Parking in UCLA Lot 3. Wednesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. No performance this coming Wednesday. Ends July 15. $35; $12, for UCLA students with Bruin card. (310) 825-2101. $26 to $43. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.
     Bob Berger, Michael Bruno, Audrey Crabtree, Patrick Daniels, Irving Gregory, Dan Krumm, Julia Randall, Stuart Rudin Ensemble

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