Critic's Notebook: Oh, Forget the Money. Let's Dress Up and Play!

August 26, 2000

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

Oh, Forget the Money. Let's Dress Up and Play!

By BRUCE WEBER

Dixie Sheridan/ FringeNYC

From "Charlie Victor Romeo," based on black box transcripts from troubled airliners.

ou have to feel fondly toward an enterprise that declares pride in its own insignificance, its very name a trumpet flourish of defiance and chagrin. The New York International Fringe Festival -- 12 days of largely unheralded theatrical performances, hundreds of them, sprinkled over the East Side of Lower Manhattan like the contents of a spice rack -- concludes tomorrow. And anyone who sampled it intermittently as I did this week can't help but feel that the joint effort of organizers, audiences, volunteer ticket takers and, of course, performers, is a buoying one for the theatrical world.
It is, after all, a celebration of the impulse of some people to put on a show and of others to see one, and what it illustrates is how undampened those instincts are by artificialities like financial resources and media attention. That the festival gets put on at all and that it spreads such a pleasant patchwork umbrella of good will -- you've never stood in line less impatiently, with such decent-seeming strangers as company -- have to be one's first critical judgments.
(snip)
"Charlie Victor Romeo," a reprise of an Off Off Broadway production (by Network 23 and Collective: Unconscious) from last winter, recreates the natural crucible of an airline cockpit during a flight emergency. It's an exceptionally vivid contribution to documentary theater, a series of blackout scenes taking, for their dialogue, the transcripts of actual black box recordings from threatened and doomed aircraft. The language is sometimes arcane, and the stories, such as they are, are unshaped; you can't tell what's happening to the plane, exactly, or how near an ultimate disaster. (Silent projections at the end of each one informs the audience of the real-life consequences.) But the excruciating uncertainty is, of course, the point; waiting for the drama to end is the drama. And the actors, a company of 10 who play pilots, co-pilots and flight attendants in varying combinations over the course of six different "flights," are splendid, projecting a variety of human responses to terror. They make you wonder what you're made of yourself -- and make you grateful for the ground under your feet.
Back to Charlie Victor Romeo

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