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On Stage
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Theater Review: Charlie Victor Romeo
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JULY 09TH, 2004
"Charlie
Victor Romeo," is a play based on the black box transcripts of six
real-life airline emergencies. It debuted five years ago at a Lower
East Side theatre and in the summer of 2000 it became a hit at the New
York International Fringe Festival. This summer a new production of
"Charlie Victor Romeo" has opened at the East Village performance space
known as P.S. 122. Here with his review is NY1 contributing critic
David Cote of Time Out New York.
Everyone has the fear of flying – from minor qualms to full-blown
phobias. When you're sitting inside hundreds of tons of steel and
electronics, hurtling down a runway for takeoff, you're bound to
wonder: How can this contraption stay in the air?
"Charlie Victor Romeo," a brilliant documentary play by the group
Collective Unconscious addresses those fears head on. The show
recreates six real airline crashes from the pilots' perspectives. Some
of the crashes were horribly fatal, some were tragedies narrowly
avoided, all of them will have you white-knuckling the armrests and
begging for Dramamine.
The title "Charlie Victor Romeo" is pilot slang for the Cockpit
Voice Recorder, the black box that records the plane's air-to-ground
communications. The transcripts of these terrifying tapes make up the
text of the play. Accordingly, there's a lot of highly-specialized
jargon, overlapping small talk, beeps and static and not much in the
way of characterization.
And yet, this potentially cold or ghoulish experiment turns out to
be amazing theater. Without pushing any message or resorting to satire,
the show studies the interface of humans and machines, and the tragedy
that can result when one of them fails. In one agonizing sequence, the
pilots grow increasingly desperate when none of their controls seem to
work. The cause? A piece of electrical tape was left over a piece of
sensitive equipment on the hull of the plane.
Besides being sucked into the human drama and technical details,
you will leave the show with a renewed appreciation for the bravery and
skill of those who fly these planes. Director Irving Gregory, who
conceived the show with Bob Berger and Patrick Daniels, differentiates
each flight crew enough so that we care about them as individuals, and
the realistic and layered sound design by Jamie Mereness really gets
under your skin and into your head. When a cockpit alarm sounds, you
will find yourself tensing up along with the crew.
"Charlie Victor Romeo" is not for the faint of heart, but it could
still scare the hell out of anyone. I saw it in the Fringe Festival
four years ago and thought I knew what to expect going into P.S. 122.
But after 90 minutes of this sensory barrage, I left just as shaken as
before and very glad to be on solid ground.
– David Cote |
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 Roma Torre
Roma Torre is NY1's theater critic, and a regular contributor to "OnStage". |
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