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Seen and Heard
Entertainment Design Online, Jun 14 2004
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Seen Off Broadway: P.S. 122 on the Lower East Side has been in
the news a lot lately, with the impending departure of Mark Russell,
its 25-year executive director, who should truth be known, really put
the place on the map and is synonymous with its success. That said, it
was nice to see that Russell was still there when I went to P.S. 122
the other night to see the award-winning production, Charlie Victor Romeo,
that has become a cult event since its debut several years ago at the
NYC Fringe Festival. Created by Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels, and Irving
Gregory of Collective: Unconscious NYC, Charlie Victor Romeo,
is a seat-gripping re-enactment of six real-life plane crashes, based
on the actual tapes from the cockpit voice recorders, (CVR, thus
Charlie, Victor, Romeo) or black box transcripts. The production has
won many awards, including the 2001 Absolut Angel Award for the use of
technology to advance the arts.
Irving Gregory and Ben Chinn in
the cockpit of Charlie Victor Romeo Photo: Bob Berger
The set designed originally by Patrick Daniels, (who also serves as technical director) and recreated for P.S. 122 by Bill Ballou and Cecile Boucher
is a small cockpit with three seats behind a piece of a nose section of
an airplane. There is a small back wall with a door to the cabins
behind, and a screen above this wall indicates the flight information,
cause of the crash and ultimately the number of survivors (if any) and
fatalities. The lighting by Matthew Eggleton helps heighten the
experience, focusing in on the beleaguered captains and cockpit crew as
they struggle helplessly to bring their planes under control before the
fateful crashes. If the pilots themselves are the real heroes of Charlie Victor Romeo, it is sound designer Jamie Mereness and sound engineer Kevin Reilly,
who does a live sound mix, that are the heroes of the production team.
The sound is brutal: a combination of low bass plane rumble that gives
you the jitters to begin with, coupled with the calm then totally
panic-filled voices of the crews in the six crashes scenarios, and
finally the sonic boom of the crashes themselves, with big enough
sub-woofers under the seats to rattle the entire room: then silence.
The effect is eerie, bone-chilling, and fascinating at the same time.
Anyone with a fear of flying might not want to see this one, yet it’s
hard to avoid wanting to see something so absolutely riveting.--ELG
© 2004,
Primedia Business Magazines and Media, a PRIMEDIA company.
All rights reserved. This article is protected
by United States copyright and other intellectual property laws and may
not be reproduced, rewritten, distributed, redisseminated, transmitted,
displayed, published or broadcast, directly or indirectly, in any medium
without the prior written permission of PRIMEDIA Business Corp.
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