A Crash Course in Plane Speaking

Scripts don't come any tauter than this—at least not ready-made. At first glance, the idea of Charlie Victor Romeo—dramatizing the cockpit voice recordings of six major air disasters—seems artificial, perhaps ghoulish. But as painstakingly researched, produced, and directed by Robert Berger, Patrick Daniels, and Irving Gregory at Collective Unconscious, this theatrical documentary turns out to be inspired.

Black-and-white slides projected above a gray cockpit introduce the facts of each flight: name, date, number on board, aviation problem. The generally able troupe of 11 actors becomes the pilots, flight engineers, and flight attendants. Some segments are catastrophically brief: a few routine exchanges, a panic, the horrifyingly rendered crash. Riveting stuff—every time. Most edge-of-the-seat are the longer sequences, where captain and crew battle to right uncontrollable planes through alternating waves of panic and relief. In their terse dialogue we see character vividly revealed in the ultimate crunch. While some swipe at each other in desperation, what stands out is the ultimate in grace under pressure, underlined by the persistent tension between the fliers'cool, technical language (explained by a glossary in the program) and the undercurrent of doom. In the 1989 tape of United Flight 232 to Sioux City, the seasoned captain (poignantly played by Stuart Rudin) fights to land an unresponsive plane, making split-second navigational decisions while offering dark jokes, kindly asides, and an elegiac lament: "Oh, Mama, gonna miss those baseball games."

Perhaps most responsible for the encompassing aura of terror is Jamie Mereness's sound design: a symphony of catastrophe orchestrated from the vibration of motors, the frantic beeps of instruments, and the urgent commands of voice alarms—all building to the thunderous crescendo of impact. Prepare for landing. —Francine Russo

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