Bob Berger could never have predicted the journey he and his collaborators, Patrick Daniels and Irving Gregory, would be taking when they set out to create Charlie Victor Romeo, the title referring to the aviation code for cockpit voice recorder. The production premiered in October 1998 in an off-Off-Broadway staging at the Collective: Unconscious Theater, of which Berger is a founding member. Extended far beyond its initial five-week run, the production recently began a national tour, which kicked off at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and will next stop in Los Angeles. UCLA Performing Arts will present Charlie Victor Romeo beginning June 27 at UCLA's Macgowan Little Theater.
As with many ingenious ideas, the conception for Charlie Victor Romeo was accidental. Berger, who had a longtime interest in aviation and who, as a former CNN cameraman, had covered the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 in New York, was thumbing through The Black Box, a 1998 collection of published transcripts from 28 airline disasters, in a Manhattan bookstore three years ago, when the idea first crossed his mind. He immediately recognized the dramatic potential of translating some of these transcripts into an innovative stage drama and brought the idea to Daniels and Gregory, also members of Collective: Unconscious.
The three men spent the next few months developing a "live theatrical documentary" based entirely on edited transcripts of cockpit voice recordings from six airline crashes. As morbid as many of the outcomes of these real-life accidents were, Berger stressed that this is not a play about death.
"Ultimately I realized that we have a play about life—about life at its most terrifying and most intense. We have a play about the most incredible heroism that you could witness, even in the case where things are not concluded in a way in which everybody's lives are saved. It is a heroism people don't necessarily think about when they think about an emergency on an airplane," said Berger, who along with Daniels and Gregory is co-producing, co-directing, and co-starring (along with five other cast members) in the production.
Charlie Victor Romeo received the 2000 New York Drama Desk Awards for Best Unique Theatrical Experience and Outstanding Design (by Jamie Mereness, the chief technical engineer at Philip Glass' Looking Glass Studios), as well as two top prizes at the 2000 New York International Fringe Festival. Recently the production was the grand prize winner of the 2001 Absolut Angel award, a competition recognizing creative concepts that use technology to advance the arts.
More than the artistic accolades, what has most caught Berger by surprise is the overwhelming response from the aviation community, which has turned up in droves to see the production. For many pilots, Charlie Victor Romeo marks the first time that they've seen, onstage or onscreen, an accurate portrayal of what really goes on inside the cockpit of an aircraft.
"I did the PR for the show initially, and once I thought we actually were doing a good job, which was very early on, I went nuts publicizing it to the aviation world via the Internet and by phone calls," recalled Berger, who paid particular attention to technical details during the research for this project. "We eventually got reviewed by an aviation newsletter that has 200,000 subscribers. The review ended up posted on the union message boards at airlines and it circulated on the Internet quite a bit. These people came, and they respected it as a work of art and as the first time they'd ever seen their lives and what they think is important depicted in a way that didn't dumb it down."
Most astonishing to Berger is that top professionals in the aviation field have praised this production as a highly valuable learning tool. Berger and his company have, in fact, cooperated with the United States Air Force to film Charlie Victor Romeo as a training video for pilots. The video has become required viewing for West Point cadets enrolled in courses in engineering psychology and human error.
Likewise, the medical community has embraced the play, which has been performed for large groups of physicians and healthcare professionals studying the effects of human error and emergencies in a medical context.
"We have been told that people's lives are going to be saved from having seen this," noted Berger. "That's not something that artists get told. It's rare enough that they're telling us it's useful, but then to take this to a level of saving lives is amazing. I never in a million years expected this to happen."
"Charlie Victor Romeo" runs June 27-July 15 at UCLA's Macgowan Little Theater. For more information, call (310) 825-2101.