|
|
|
|
|
Cockpit crises teach strong
lesson
Play
attracts attention of professionals
By Roberta Burnett Special for The Republic
Special for The Republic
April 19, 2002
Since Shakespeare's time, English writers have told us that the
arts' dual purpose is "to teach and to delight."
Today, if theater intends to teach even a little bit,
American puritans call it highbrow (as in "not for us"). If it
delights, then it must be extreme, for everything from sunglasses to
vodka. In steep thrills lies pleasure.
For the next couple of weeks at the Scottsdale Center for the
Arts, we have a chance to see useful theater that has a huge share
of inherent excitement.
Charlie Victor Romeo, named after the voice recorder
on airplanes, is a play in six scenes. Each scene has a small cast,
played in a small space, the airliner cockpit. There isn't much
action, but there is plenty of conflict and errors in judgment.
It doesn't remove the suspense to say that most scenes depict
last moments of life for crew and passengers in devastating
collisions of plane, water and earth. In other towns, the tech-y
guys, the ones with button-down collars and pocket protectors (the
ones who almost never go to plays), form a hefty segment of the
audience. It is they who become obsessed by the play and next time
bring their friends.
The reason? Each of the six vignettes is scripted from voice
tapes of large airliners about to lose it. There are few and minor
changes. Some of these planes deep six, and others don't. But we are
there, as if perched on the nose of the airliner, looking in at the
crew in what might be their rational-emotional death throes. That is
the substance of great and small tragedy, of the sorts we are
familiar with. Men and women struggling to right the tippy tide of
the events, aware of all the treacherous possibilities and often
enough unable to save themselves. Sounds like Sophocles to me.
Developed by three men, two theater people and one English
major, Charlie Victor Romeo is fraught with tension. Said Bob
Berger, one of the originators of the show, the tapes are a matter
of public record when they are entered into official reports. He and
his friends read hundreds to make this selection of a very powerful
six.
That isn't what got the engineers, the airline pilots and,
interestingly, the U.S. Air Force, buzzing. From the third week of
its opening in a tiny neighborhood theater in New York City, airline
personnel stopped backstage after the show to ask leading questions,
like, "What was the theater company doing to get this play made into
a video for use in training pilots?" That was amazing to Berger, the
English major and an admitted "tech-y idea man."
Six months out from the show's inception, the Air Force, with
input from the Pentagon, Berger said, was sending a crew to do those
training films. West Point cadets enrolled in engineering psychology
courses and studies of human error began to see the play.
It isn't the compelling dialogue data alone that opened the
door into the military. It's what the off-duty pilots saw from their
perches at the nose tip of the airliner looking in. Charlie
Victor Romeo is what all great drama is about, how people
behave.
In this case, under life-threatening pressure. We see
ordinary mortals strain for control of their plane, and their
cohorts, more lowly ranked men and women, react normally. They are
afraid to step beyond the bounds of rank, cultural background and
gender even when the boss is making mistakes, even when the outcome
could save their lives. Audiences discover here that human beings
are so conditioned by our culture and its structures that we cannot
let them go. In this play, more times than not, that conclusion
kills.
So far, "the lessons pilots have learned from the study of
the interaction of crews through crises (like these) have a serious
impact on aviation safety. Close to 70 percent of aviation accidents
are related to human factors," Berger said.
Berger noted that "there's now a science in aviation called
crew resource management. It studies people interacting under stress
in the cockpit of an airplane, and the ways rank, cultural
differences and gender complicate decisionmaking. It turns out these
are big factors in aviation safety."
Enter another set of characters from life's playing fields.
The physicians and nursing staff in emergency and intensive care
units of hospitals. Oh, no, not those who clean up the aftermath of
the crashes the play depicts.
Working medical professionals see that Charlie Victor
Romeo's players mirror themselves and the psychodynamics of
their ER or ICU staffs as they leap into situation after situation
trying to save lives. With the play now touring to university
medical colleges and organizations like Banner Health Systems in
Phoenix, Berger said, "that meant that what we'd created was
actually useful art, useful. Imagine that."
Physicians and nurses, Berger said, "can learn from
catastrophic failure when the airline crew who die can't. The
patient can die. The doctor can still learn. Learning from cockpit
failure isn't taught in med schools."
Dr. Jay Kaplan is vice president for emergency services for
Banner Health.
He also works with Studer Group, a company that works with
200 hospitals over the United States to create excellence in medical
services.
Now, through his enthusiasm and dedication, Banner Health
Systems in Phoenix is using Charlie Victor Romeo to introduce
to physicians and nursing staff the notion that they can begin to
change the hierarchical structure of the high-intensity medical
culture.
"Patient safety and incidents of medical error have been on
the public mind for several years now," Kaplan said. "There are many
processes in medical practice (that) we could be performing better.
Physicians aren't trained in medical school or residency to step
back from 'doing it, doing it, doing it' to look at examples (of
work done) and try to create ways of doing it better," he said.
Kaplan said he believes that Charlie Victor Romeo is
the launching pad to change. The medical industry "has many ideas
about how to improve practices. The real question is how do we
implement the ideas."
Kaplan said Banner is taking its physicians and nursing staff
to two performances of the play at the Scottsdale Center's 136-seat
Stage 2.
"Performance art can inspire people to recognize a problem
and to change," Kaplan said. "Banner is looking at this theatrical
event first to increase awareness of the issues pointed out in that
play and also to inspire our leadership and our staff to want to
make and create better processes that will lead to better outcomes
for our patients and our staff."
Originally scheduled to run for five weeks when it opened in
New York, Charlie Victor Romeo is now in its third year. It
may just be the seed of a peaceful revolution in medical care.
Reach the writer at roburnett@hotmail.com.
| |
|
|
|
• Community
• Obituaries
• Traffic
Info
• AZ
Neighbors
[an error occurred while processing this
directive] |
Republic
Front Page | Valley
& State | Sports