Off-off-Broadway theater and the U.S. military make for strange bedfellows. Add in the medical community, and you've got an even more unlikely alliance.

Uniting the three is "Charlie Victor Romeo," a play that vividly portrays how man reacts under fire.

"CVR" is theater in the extreme, a verbatim performance of the "black box" transcripts from six real-life airline accidents, both well-known and obscure. It's coming to the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts for six days beginning Tuesday.

Starting in the fall of 1999 with a five-week run at a 60-seat theater in the Lower East Side of New York City, then extending five times for a sold-out eight-month run, "CVR" has caught on worldwide. It has been performed across the United States, in Australia and by a troupe now in Tokyo.

Called "riveting . . . brilliant and haunting" by The Hollywood Reporter and "chillingly realistic" by The New York Times, it is a "naked, raw depiction of people in a crisis," said Bob Berger, co-director, co-producer and one of eight cast members. "The idea of error, I had no idea what CVR on Page 2D

CVR: A visualization of final moments in the cockpit

CVR: It provides a visualization of final moments in the cockpit

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it meant before I did this play. . . . It's never one person screwing up."

Instead, he said, these real-life cockpit dramas represent a long chain of interconnected events that without each other would be insignificant.

"That very complicated system of how things can go wrong is something that lay people need an understanding of," Berger said. "That complex system is exactly what isn't dumbed-down."

In fact, he said, "Charlie Victor Romeo's" portrayal of airline accidents stands out from TV or film in that it is not sensationalized.

"As someone who has worked in media all my life, there is a tendency to dumb-down, but the effort in this play is to absolutely not dumb-down," said Berger, who worked for seven years as an engineer for CNN. "You are left with an interactive experience if you want one."

The transcripts
Berger, Patrick Daniels and Irving Gregory are three actors in the play; the three co-produce and co-direct it, as well.

Berger said he and Gregory were inspired to create "CVR" when they happened upon a book about aviation accidents while walking together on Broadway in the summer of 1999.

The two men bought the book, "started walking back to the theater and pretty much had a plan by the time we got there," Berger said.

The title, "Charlie Victor Romeo," is radio-speak for CVR, which stands for cockpit voice recorder.

According to Berger, three guidelines were used in choosing which cockpit voice recorder transcripts to re-enact.

First, Berger said, the three men wanted the play to be interesting from an aviation perspective and didn't want to replicate somewhat common mistakes. Second, "we wanted it to be interesting for actors to work on and for us to work on." Third, they wanted situations that everyone, including ordinary people, could imagine themselves in.

"We wanted to make sure that there were plenty of parallels to everyday lives," Berger said.

They chose six imperiled flights, the outcomes of which range from everyone onboard dying to passengers surviving with only minor injuries. They include an AeroPeru flight from October 1996, in which, unbeknownst to the pilots, the cleaning crew taped over a vital instrument on the exterior of the plane; an American Eagle flight from October 1994, in which a circling plane waiting to land in Indiana accumulated too much ice on its wings; and a U.S. Air Force flight from September 1995 that crashed in Alaska after the engine ingested birds upon takeoff.

Originally, Berger said, he, Gregory and Daniels wanted to convey the "psychology of fear" and the "complicated nature of the events" but found unexpectedly "naked heroism."

"Nobody who is depicted in the play thinks about impending doom, or if they do, it is not depicted in what they are doing," Berger said. "They are fighting to resolve the situation with everything they've got. . . . What people do when they're fighting for their lives, for yours, it's amazing. It's powerful."

This surprised the three producers.
"A lot of the revelations that we came upon personally . . . were not things that we expected to see or feel or think about (as lay people)," Berger said. Then again, "some of the things we expected to find weren't there."

One of the things Berger and his colleagues didn't expect to find was intense interest from aviators, the Air Force and even the medical community. Members of the aviation community have made up an estimated one-third of the production's audience, and the Air Force was so impressed with the realistic portrayal of these emergencies that it has used "CVR" as a training video for its air crews since 2001.

"The idea of whether art is useful is a classic one, but to be told concretely by our government that it could be used to save lives was wonderful," Berger said. "It's almost as if King Lear came and reviewed 'King Lear.' "

What makes this live documentary so realistic, he said, is simply that it is so stark and unedited. No third party such as a camera crew or interviewer "inherently alters the reality" of what takes place.

"There isn't any effort to color what's in those transcripts subjectively," said Berger, who, along with Gregory and Daniels, didn't give the actors any character background. "We are not attempting to personify the lives of the people involved. We didn't think that would be right."

The characters are identified only by name so as not to delve into their private lives. Even the casting was not sex-specific. The only aspect of the play that is not "completely objective, completely impartial" is the interpretation of how things were said, which is indicated only by the punctuation in the transcripts.

"The artistic interpretation of how somebody says something is central to the play," Berger said.

Instructional video
Embraced by the medical community for its vivid, accurate depiction of human error and reaction during emergencies, "CVR" has been performed at three nationwide medical conventions as well as privately for various medical institutions.

"You see how a good team can work and how teamwork fails. . . . It's very similar to work in the clinical arena," said Dr. Bob Wears, director of the Center for Safety and Emergency Care at Shands in Jacksonville.

Having researched patient safety issues since 1994, Wears first saw the play at a National Patient Safety Association convention in St. Paul, Minn. After the play, "I left the room thinking about it and the parallels in the things that I do. . . . The big difference is that my life is usually not involved."

Portraying loss of control but also resilience, " 'CVR' shows how complex, socio-technical teams perform under stress, either well or poorly," said Wears, who also works in the emergency room. "The same kinds of feelings and situations resonated with me."

When Wears returned to Florida after seeing "CVR," he contacted several theaters, but "theaters in Jacksonville were very much not interested," he said. "I pushed and pushed for it, but then kind of lost hope for it and gave up."

He gave up, that is, until he saw it was coming to Gainesville.

Michael Blachly, director of the Center for the Performing Arts since July 2000, came from a 14-year career in the same position at the University of California Los Angeles. In June 2000, a manager friend told him that she had booked the play for three weeks in Los Angeles and one week in Gainesville.

Initially Blachly thought it seemed "a little macabre. I felt a little unsure about presenting a play about planes going down."

But once he saw it in New York, "I was taken by it," he said.

As for Gainesville, "I think we have an audience that is bright, well-educated and that understands the meaning of grace under pressure," Blachly said. "(They understand) that sometimes things are taken out of your immediate control and that you have to respond the best you can."

There will be a discussion with the eight-member cast after each performance, and the University of Florida Performing Arts will play host to a seminar at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, the day after opening night.

Kerry Crooks, assistant vice president of public relations at UF, former aircrew evaluator and accident survivor, will lead a panel discussion in the Performing Arts Center's Black Box Theater.

Consisting of Crooks, Berger and five other aviation specialists, the panel will delve into the dynamics involved with in-flight incidents and accidents and at "aviation at its most poignant moments."

Crooks admits surprise when several panel members jumped at the chance to participate in the seminar - especially considering that all of them will be seeing "Charlie Victor Romeo" for the first time Tuesday, on opening night at the Phillips Center.

"I did not think that an artistic performance would have that credibility," Crooks said.

Having read the transcripts, Crooks said he thinks "CVR" will be valuable to local aviators because it provides a visualization of final moments in the cockpit.

"You've either had to experience it or imagine it, and this is that step in between," he said.

Crooks experienced it in 1981 after being in the Air Force for less than one year. The plane he was in clipped a cliff and crash-landed in a blizzard in the Aleutian Islands near Alaska. Numerous people died, including a man he tried to save from the wreckage.

"This (play) may be - for someone who has gone through this - traumatic," said Crooks, whose father taught the first jet-transport pilots for American Airlines. "Reading the transcripts of the incidents and accidents is intense, so I'm not sure how it will affect me in a dramatic performance."

But in a way, Crooks has been reassured.
"Reading from the transcripts of the black box recorders really gives you a sense of not just the professionalism of the air crew involved, but the basic nature of humanity," Crooks said. "Humans have an innate sense to fight until all options are played out."