Dark Voyage
Voices From The Black Box
Six vignettes staring straight into the gaping maw of death: That's the existential package delivered by the acclaimed off-off-Broadway production Charlie Victor Romeo, which makes its West Coast premiere next Wednesday at UCLA's Macgowan Little Theater. Culled from the never-ending roster of airline disasters, the play translates six "black box" recordings (CVR are the call letters for cockpit voice recorder) into a taut, dramatic experience merging the disparate sensibilities of Samuel Beckett, the original Star Trek series with Captain Kirk and the TV reality show Cops. "It's very much a bait-and-switch in terms of audience expectations," explains Bob Berger, one of the creators of the play. "We definitely decided not to dumb it down, not to change the jargon from the material we were working with. The tendency is to explain everything. But we didn't want to make things that simple." The minimalist set design and the fanatical devotion to dialogue as preserved by the CVRs indicates something unique at work. No wonder Berger and his crew have received plaudits for their realism from the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice, as well as from the U.S. Air Force, commercial pilots and the medical community. But what engages the general audience is the marrow-chilling illusion that you're looking over the shoulders of these pilots for a glimpse at the abyss. "You couldn't write dialogue this wrenching," says Berger of the patter recorded just before these tragedies took place. "Like when a pilot, moments before impact, says, "I guess we're going to miss those baseball games after all.' Or when ground control tells a pilot, "You're clear to land on any runway,' and he cracks, literally 30 seconds before a crash that kills a third of the passengers, "Oh, you want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?' That sort of black humor just blows you away."
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