I saw a performance of Charlie Victor Romeo in a tiny "black box" theater in lower Manhattan with an SRO (standing room only) crowd. The set was the forward nose of a generic airliner with the pilots' seats and engineer's console. The curtain at the rear of the stage served as the cockpit bulkhead.

The play, named for the CVR (cockpit voice recorder,) is actually a series of recreations of what transpired among the crews in the cockpits of six airliners up to the moment they crashed. Transcripts of the CVR provide the dialogue among crewmembers.

Each of the six accidents is introduced by a slide projected above the stage that gives the basic flight information, location, number of souls on board and the probable cause. In the blackout following each sequence, another slide is projected that describes the final outcome and the number of fatalities.

The six accidents that are re-created are American Flight 1572 (MD-83,) East Granby, Connecticut, November 12, 1995; American Eagle 4184 (ATR72,) Roselawn, Indiana, October 31, 1994; Aeroperu Flight 603 (Boeing 757,) Lima, Peru, October 2, 1996; USAF Yukla 27 (E3A AWACS,) Elmendorf AFB, Alaska, September 22, 1995; JAL Flight 123 (Boeing 747,) Mt. Osutaka, Japan, August 12, 1985; and United Flight 232 (DC-10,) Sioux City, Iowa, July 19, 1989.

The evening, depending on the extent of your involvement in aviation, is either terrifying, exploitative or even surprisingly instructive. As a pilot and knowing ahead of time the outcome and the probable cause of each of the accidents, I found it uncomfortable to watch the accidents play out in real time. The scripts for each scenario are taken straight from the CVR transcripts from each of the accidents. The actors, who for the most part did an excellent job of conveying the building confusion while trying to figure out what was happening and why and the terror when the outcome became obvious and inevitable, presented the accidents precisely as they happened. As a result, there are moments when two, three, or even four people are talking at the same time, and it's difficult to follow what's being said and by whom.

Bob Berger, one of the directors and producers, insists the play was not intended to be sensationalistic or exploitative. It's an effort, he said, to show human emotions and behavior in the most critical circumstances.

Nevertheless, to this pilot, the idea of dramatizing the harrowing moments of real-life tragedies seems exploitative, despite claims to the contrary. For example the crash in Alaska of the Air Force modified Boeing 707 AWACS was a result of a bird strike, and the flight lasted a total of about three minutes and seems to have been included in the show for no purpose except to let us sit and watch a crew, unable to do anything to save themselves, face the inevitable.

On the other hand, from a pilot's perspective, two of the accidents provided examples of cockpit resource management at its worst and its best. The Aeroperu accident in which maintenance people had failed to remove tape they had placed over the static ports, leaving the pilots without information from the air data sensors, was a dramatic portrayal of a pilot's inability or unwillingness to listen to suggestions from his copilot, who in this case, happened to be a woman. In contrast, in the DC-10 accident in Sioux City, Iowa, in which an uncontained failure of the center engine ruptured the three hydraulic systems that powered the airplane's flight controls, Captain Al Haynes managed, with the help of his crew and a dead-heading pilot, to keep the airplane in the air and wrestle it to the airport. Although 111 people were killed in the accident, the crew's efforts saved the lives of 185 peopl, a remarkable performance - and worth the price of admission to Charlie Victor Romeo.

The show has played to some 10,000 people, and Berger estimates that between 3,000 and 4,000 of them are pilots or involved with aviation. "It's been surprising the way non-pilots relate, and even people who don't have an understanding of the technical things going on are challenged by the context and by what the actors are saying," said Berger.

A number of aviation educators have expressed an interest in using the show to teach pilots and accident investigators about cockpit resource management. A professor of a human errors course at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point brought his class of cadets to the theater, and a Major General at the Pentagon is planning to use the Aeroperu and the United DC-10 segments of a videotaped performance for training military personel, including pilots and technicians.

The company has been booked by a number of organizations (in December they played to 4,000 attendees at the National Forum on Quality Improvement in Healthcare in San Francisco) and will be taking the production on the road, including performances at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and a series of performances in conjunction with Pomegranate Arts. To confirm the performance schedule and for information about tickets, contact the Charlie Victor Romeo website at www.charlievictorromeo.com or Pomegranate Atrs, 632 Broadway, Suite 902, New York, NY 10012, telephone 212/228-2221; fax 212/475-0004, or email info@pomarts.com.