Charlie Victor Romeo's Patrick Daniels
The Tape Of Things To Come

Located in New York's lower East Side, Collective: Unconscious is a theatre ensemble who are dedicated to creating, producing and performing accessible, affordable and challenging theatre, music and visual arts.

They have been operating for roughly nine years, according to Patrick Daniels who came on board a few months after the group's inception, but until now most of their work has remained fairly low key. The play that changed it all is Charlie Victor Romeo, a series of vignettes that re-enact the emotionally charged few moments before six airline crashes.

National and, now, international interest has seen this short play catapulted into the mainstream domain to become a significant piece of theatre that delves into the human spirit and its will to live. It has also been picked up by the US Air Force as a training video for young pilots and has been viewed by West Point cadets enrolled in courses for studying engineering psychology and human error. Particularly in the wake of September 11, the play has aroused plenty of curiosity about what may have been happening inside the cockpits and cabins of the planes used to crash into the World Trade Centre Twin Towers and the Pentagon. For many, viewing the play has been an emotional watershed. For the creators of Charlie Victor Romeo, they feel that by continuing to perform the play they have refused to become victims of the fear and panic created by the attacks.
After an eight month off Broadway season that required Collective: Unconscious to extend their dates five times, the Perth season will be the first time that Charlie Victor Romeo has been performed outside of the US.

Charlie Victor Romeo can be seen at the Octagon Theatre, UWA, from Wednesday, February 13 to Saturday, February 16; Tuesday, February 19, Wednesday, February 20, Friday, February 22 and Saturday, February 23, starting at 8pm. Tickets through BOCS on (08) 9484 1133.

By CHELSEA HUNTER.

This is quite an atypical piece of theatre, where did the idea spring from?
Well, the deal is that myself, Irving Gregory and Bob Berger are the people that made the show and those two guys in July of '99 were walking down Broadway in Manhattan and were having a conversation about media and how there is a lot of manipulation in reality based TV shows and kind of exploitative stuff that you see, especially in America. I don't know what television is like in Australia but I'm guessing there is some aspect of that there. So they were talking abut media and its manipulation of reality and how it isn't necessarily reality at all but TV watching something that is supposed to be reality. Then they stepped into a book store, Bob had to pick up some books that he had on order there, Irving was waiting for him and Bob pointed out a book called The Black Box by Colin McPherson which is a collection of 25 or 30 transcripts of Black Box recordings with some editorial comments about each incident within the transcripts.

So Irving is reading this book and Bob comes up after getting his books from the cashier and starts reading over his shoulder and says "You know this might make a really cool play," and Irving looks at him and says "That's a great idea." Our place is about 15 minutes walk from there, so they walked back over to the East Side, to Ludlow Street and within that time they came up with a basic framework of how you might do something like that and they came and found me and said "Hey what do you think about this? We want you to help us make it real." And I said "Wow that's a cool idea, lets do it."

Not all of your transcripts are from this book, how did you get hold of the other black box transcripts that you use?
All of the ones that we used that are American in origin are actually available on the National Transportation Safety Bureau's website. They do an investigation of any major incident, whether it is a crash or whatever and once they have come to a conclusion about whatever the cause or group of causes were, their reasoning of analysis, once they're done with that they publish it and it becomes part of the public domain. In America there is this huge body of informational stuff that, by law, has to be available, so you go to the NTSB site and there are any number of transcripts for these things, as long as they are done with their investigation. There are also a couple that were not initially investigated by the NTSB, one is a Japanese incident and one is the Peruvian one, and there is a whole slew of websites that have various transcripts out there for various reasons. The internet is awesome for stuff like that.

Did you have a criteria that you used to choose the transcripts by?
Once we started looking at them we realised that to make a dramatic play you want to show some differences so there has to be some sort of variety. We also figured that there was going to be the basic examples of stuff that might happen. There are six vignettes in the show so that is only a few possibilities of the variety of things that could happen in hugely complex machines and folks are very complicated as well.

There is an example of people working well together, there is an example of people working poorly together, there is an example of something that no-one could have done anything about, there is an example of gross negligence. We try to do three shows a night here at Collective Unconscious, so each show has to be more or less an hour long and we were also required by our booking policy to make each show a certain length, so we figured we want to have one really long and also a couple of short ones just to break up the pacing so the audience doesn't get set into one specific rhythm. It works well that way, somehow we got really lucky. There is quite a bit of work that went into it from the three of us as well as the rest of the people in the show who mulled over what we were going to do and how it should all fit together, but as we worked on it, it just sort of became apparent what was necessary for the order and what ones were the correct ones to use.

It is very sensitive subject matter that you are dealing with, especially because some of the crashes the you have chosen have resulted in the death of people. How have you avoided disrespecting their deaths?
Well, first of all one of the first things that we made up our minds about is that we were not going to try and play people, the individuals that are in these things. Most of them we don't even know their names. Some of them by necessity, because of casting limitations, there are women playing men's characters and that helped. I mean we did that because we had to do that, but it turns out that it gave some distance for the people whose families were involved in these things, it also turned out that because we aimed to be as accurate as possible as far as playing pilots and how they deal with crisis situations, there are a lot of pilots who think that it is incredibly realistic, so that alone makes it OK.

For instance there were some people who came one night and they actually found out after the shows that they were cousins of some of the people that were in one of the incidents, who had died. So after the show they went up to the performers and they were gushing, they were like "Wow you really nailed those people, I saw my cousin." And we were like "What?" When we started we didn't know their names, we found out eventually through research but we didn't start out with that information. The first and most important thing was to imagine ourselves in the situation and then there was research done to figure out what words meant and then memorising lines was incredibly difficult because it was repetitive and jargonistic and difficult to understand even if you know what is going on.

But through that work and the fact that we tried to put ourselves in the situation rather than being these other people, it becomes believable and we have a lot of people say that they're happy that we're doing this, that it is a memorial. There was a Japanese article about a woman who manages a survivor's group from the Japanese crash that we do, and she is quoted in there as saying that she is really glad that we are doing this because people don't remember, which is fascinating for me. I would definitely say that we are riding an edge, it's a fine line and in my opinion perhaps we cross it, I don't know. But the support by in large has been totally positive.

Crisis brings out the truth in human nature, what are some of the things that you have learned about humans during the process of putting these vignettes together?
Well, I tell ya, for me personally, it is amazing. I always thought that I could imagine myself being in one of these situations, I mean I'm not a pilot, so I'm not trained or whatever, but I just imagine myself screaming and cursing all the way into the ground.

Even the people in one of the scenes specifically, they really lose it and panic but they're still trying and they still go for it. People that come to the show and aren't pilots, they get that, they can relate to that because on some level in everyone there is a struggle going on somewhere. A lot of people who have nothing to do with aviation are incredibly moved by this as well. Everybody likes a story about guys that are heroes. People, even if they fail, are really trying to not only save their own lives, obviously, but everyone else's as well and that makes it very enticing.

It is an amazing thing to work on this and realise that these people are incredibly trained and it takes a certain type of person to want to be a pilot in the first place, but they are not so different from most people because in crisis, people do crazy things when the chips are down, like you hear about the motorcycle that fell on the kid and the old lady went and picked it up. In aviation the machines that they are dealing with are so huge and complicated and potentially so out of control so quickly, but the trying, the against all odds kind of thing is incredibly fascinating for me.

A video of the play has been used for training young pilots in various crash scenarios. How do they respond to seeing their fellow aviators in these intense situations? Are they inspired and encouraged or overwhelmed?
Some of both actually. It is interesting, mostly they are impressed with the realism that we bring which is funny because we are sitting behind a piece of plywood and they look at our set afterwards and say "Wow it looks like you made that in high school shop class." But they talk over and over again about what pilots do when they're flying, like when you're driving you scan your speedometer to the rear view mirror to the side view mirror back to the road. If you're driving defensively, paying attention to what is going on your concentration is taken. When we first started doing the show, during one of the scenes we were looking out the window and it is night time. The scene takes place when there is a storm and afterwards Bob ended up talking to one of the pilots and he said "How did you know to get those people looking out the window?" and Bob was like "I don't know, we just wanted the audience to see their faces."

And the pilots are like "Well, here's what they would be doing." So it's great, we get acting notes from professionals who are actually in the audience. So we started adding in stuff like that and people were like "Wow, that's exactly what we would do." Some of them ask "How many of you guys are pilots?" And when we say none of us it blows their minds because we are doing everything more or less right. We don't have a specific airplane there but we're doing what they would do. In one of the scenes the cockpit door keeps locking and there is a circuit breaker that controls the lock and the captain keeps telling one of the other officers in the cockpit to pull the circuit breaker and we didn't know where it was, we didn't even think about wondering where it was, the actor who goes for it just goes for it.

Then somebody one night asked how we knew where the circuit breaker was and what that makes me think is that in airplane design, as in a lot of other design, you work intuitively, you put the light switch at the right height on the wall so that you can just reach without thinking about it and turn on the light. Anyway it's nice because they had a lot of good stuff to say, they're pretty much blown away that we're figuring out this stuff, doing it properly more or less.