"Uh-oh!"
The terror of actual airplane crashes
Is brought to life in the black-box
Docudrama Charlie Victor Romeo
By Jason Zinoman for TimeOut NYAl Haynes was a few minutes from almost certain death. As the pilot of a large commercial flight from Denver to Chicago carrying 296 passengers, he suddenly lost control of all steering mechanisms after a fan blade cut out all three of his hydraulic systems. His only hope was an impossibly difficult emergency landing in Sioux City, Iowa. As he maneuvered precariously to the ground, using the throttles of the two remaining wing engines, Haynes turned to the flight attendant and said, "I really have my doubts you'll se me standing up."
No play presently running on New York stages can match the intensity of this dramatic scene in Collective: Unconscious's current hit, Charlie Victor Romeo. That may be because it really happened. Taken from cockpit voice-recorder transcripts of actual aviation emergencies, the documentary piece, which includes vignettes of six incidents that occurred between 1985 and 1996, has been playing to stunned and speechless sold-out audiences.
What kind of person would pay money to see such ghoulish tragedies reenacted (especially in the wake of the recent Alaska Airlines disaster off the coast of Southern California)? It turns out that pilots are particularly fond of Charlie Victor Romeo (which, if you haven't guessed, is a code name for cockpit voice recorder); a group of 30 of them attended the show I saw. Bob Berger, who produced and directed CVR along with Patrick Daniels and Irving Gregory, estimates that pilots compose one third of its audience. Berger has won plaudits from these professionals for the show's unsparing veracity. AVWeb, a website dedicated to the aviation industry, praised the production for its "excellent job of being true to the cockpit conversations, including the banter, the tensions, the expletives and the arguments."
Not surprisingly, many other people also enjoy the show for more macabre reasons. "I love death," said a cheery audience member sitting beside me. "I'll see any play or movie that involves disasters or lots of people dying." He was not disappointed.
When I tell Berger (who also co-founded Collective Unconscious, helping to turn a Dominican brothel into a hip Ludlow Street performance space) about this bloodthirsty fan, he bristles, "Hey, it's the East Village, and there is no limit to the amount of freaks out there. I accept that there are people who want to see death, but I hope they walk away with something else."
Berger, a burly former CNN field engineer who spent three months covering the TWA 800 crash in 1996, clearly doesn't want to be seen as someone merely satisfying voyeuristic fantasies. "We didn't want to trivialize or sensationalize anything," he says. "We knew that this would have to be really straight and really serious. It's very sensitive stuff."
Indeed, the sparse production is tastefully stripped down to its bare essentials. An overhead projector introduces and concludes each segment with information about the airline, the date of the incident, the number of passengers and crew on board, the cause of the emergency and the number of casualties. The set is minimal, and the costumes are simple and realistic. Most of the actors deliver laudably restrained performances, capturing the blandly paternal air of pilots.
The most elaborate part of the production is Jamie Mereness's dense, harrowing sound design, which simulates a wide variety of crashes and explosions through careful studio work. In one instance, Mereness achieves a roaring effect by mixing the noise of a Lincoln Town Car smashing into a hot-dog stand with the ruckus of a train wreck.
The most surprising thing about CVR is what doesn't happen in the cockpit: There are no psychological breakdowns, teary confessions or existential moments. These pilots, for the most part, maintain an almost delusional concentration, keeping composure, and even a sense of humor, throughout the emergency situations.
Their conversations don't often stray from somewhat impenetrable technical jargon, and it's often difficult to discern exactly what's going on. At times, the show can seem like an absurdist play in a foreign language (Pilot: Rudder ratio. Copilot: Yeah. I have…let's see, source selector. Pilot: Yeah, shit. Rudder ratio. Copilot: Mach trim. Mach trim.) yet it's never boring or repetitive. Each highly suspenseful scene has its own distinctive dramatic life. For example, the third vignette spotlights the escalating tension and miscommunication between pilots, while the fourth is a brief, bizarre crash that emphasizes the cold stoicism of two military officials.
Berger came up with the idea for CVR from Malcolm MacPherson's 1998 book The Black Box, a collection of transcripts from 28 disasters - including the space shuttle challenger tragedy which ends with the chilling exclamation, "Uh-oh!" After spending a lunch hour reading the book in a Barnes & Noble store, Berger quickly saw the vast dramatic potential of these dialogues. "Nobody writes this well," says Berger. "Nobody writes the way people really talk."
Berger is also quick to mention his desire to create a play that was the "inverse" of sensational TV reality shows (When Animals Attack, COPS, etc.). "Those television shows provide spectacle without meaning," he says. "In other words, you get powerboats flipping over, cars rolling into brick walls, cops swinging batons, but no context, no understanding of why the jet goes flipping over or what the guy feels as he's getting slammed up against the wall. In my show, all you get is human context."
On this count, Berger may protest too much. His raw brand of documentary theater reveals very little context. The audience knows almost nothing about these pilots; and besides the obvious panic, we don't know what they're thinking and, often, can't even make out why the disaster occurs.
While CVR can summon only a limited range of emotions, it does so with amazing effectiveness. What is most fascinating is seeing how a real human face responds to a disaster situation that almost all of us know only from the movies. It turns out - believe it or not - that real pilots are even more resilient and unflappable than their Hollywood counterparts (with the possible exception of those tough guys from Top Gun).
"This isn't a show about the way people die; it's about the way people live," explains Berger. "These people [in the show] don't spend any time dying. Their dying takes a tenth of a second at the point of impact, and the rest of it is living to the very end."