One afternoon last weekend, while a rainbow of smiling children frolicked to a noisy punk band lighting up an East Village block party, I stepped into a nearby performance space and felt as if I died six times over.

Charlie Victor Romeo (CVR), now playing at P.S. 122, contains some of the most chilling moments I've ever experienced in a theatre. Named after the airline industry's acronym for the cockpit voice recorder, it recreates the final moments of six flights, based on transcripts of dialogue recorded by onboard black boxes.

The mechanics of the show are elementary, just an earnest cast of eight, a gut-wrenching sound design, and a minimal set: a simple mock-up of a generic cockpit below a small screen that displays, before each of the six scenes, the flight number, location, date, number of people onboard, and cause of the crash.

Knowing about some of these causes may give you pause before you board your next flight. A U.S. Air Force Boeing AWACS plummets when two engines ingest multiple Canada geese during takeoff. Another plane clips some trees on its runway approach because of an incorrect altimeter setting. The most easily preventable cause of all six accidents occurred on a 1996 Aero Peru night flight whose pilots were flummoxed when their instruments malfunctioned because a maintenance crew washing the plane had taped over the plane's static ports, which pick up flight data like airspeed and altitude, and had forgotten to remove the tape.

Some of these flight crews have 15 or 20 excruciating minutes to brainstorm their way out of disaster. Others have mere seconds. Almost all act with an equanimity and everyday heroism that nervous fliers should find reassuring.

I'm not quite sure where Charlie Victor Romeo fits in the context of theatre. Its creators call it a "live theatrical documentary," which is apt but makes it sound too dry. I'd be inclined to call it reality theatre, if our concept of reality hadn't been so debased by the crap on television that it should sue for defamation of character.

One of the refreshing aspects of Charlie Victor Romeo is that, unlike other reality-based pieces like Anna Deavere Smith's monologues or The Laramie Project -- plays in which the process of gathering the voices becomes part of the final work -- the dialogue sources for CVR are pure. The subjects never knew their words would end up spoken by actors, so they weren't moulding their words for posterity. There is no Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work here, no need for us to work in order to figure out what is real within the reality.

In fact the play began as a repudiation of the reality genre. One day in 1999, actors Bob Berger and Irving Gregory were walking down Broadway disparaging low-rent reality TV shows like Cops and Blind Date (this was before Big Brother and The Littlest Groom had reset the bar), when they wandered into a Shakespeare & Company bookstore and began paging through The Black Box, a book made up of transcripts of air disasters.

They immediately realized it made for great, albeit non-linear, Wooster Group-ish dialogue. Berger, a former cameraman and engineer for CNN, well knew that what people are fed as reality is rarely real. Also, he was frustrated by the news media's dependence on sensationalistic pictures when covering crashes, which never manage to convey the truth of what went right or wrong onboard.

CVR first played in the fall of 1999 at the Collective: Unconscious performance space on the Lower East Side, an area, it is safe to say, not usually known for attracting members of the U.S. military. But one evening a representative from the U.S. Air Force wandered in. After the show, he told Berger he wanted to make a videotape of the show. That tape is now used to help members of the military recognize that every job performed on a team -- from pumping the right amount of fuel (hello, Gimli Glider?) to scanning a runway for debris before takeoff, to actually piloting a plane -- is vital. It is also used to train people in understanding how team dynamics can make the difference between life and death.

Berger and his colleagues at Collective: Unconscious have a letter from a general at the Pentagon thanking the company for saving lives of government employees. "It's something so unbelievably rewarding for us -- regardless of our political beliefs, we're talking about safety," says Berger. "We framed that letter and put our defence contract in the window of our downtown art theatre. To be of use outside of the arts community with a piece of art that is a good piece of art, and also something that's potentially life-saving, is the most rewarding thing that's ever happened to me or the other authors of the play."

shoupt@globeandmail.com