Black Box Theater of a Different Kind

'Charlie Victor Romeo' Uses Unscripted Drama Of Cockpit Recordings

"Charlie Victor Romeo," which could be called the last word in documentary theater, reenacts airplane emergencies by using verbatim transcripts from cockpit voice recorders. The set is a cramped cockpit, the sound design a bone-crunching simulation of engine noise and turbulence.

The planes are going down. You are there.

Co-creator and actor Robert Berger describes the dramatic experience: "In a theater you have a ticket, you have an assigned seat, you have an emergency exit, you have people seating you -- this whole parallel that's used to great effect."

And it's so loud that the Studio Theatre -- now hosting this production by New York's experimental company Collective: Unconscious -- has given the show a 7 p.m. curtain to keep "Charlie Victor Romeo" from blowing out a later show in the complex.

"The thing that we've got here," says Patrick Daniels, 38, who created and directed the piece in 1999 with fellow Manhattanites Berger and Irving Gregory, "is a forensic record that's used as an analysis tool that . . . becomes some really interesting text to work from. That's a unique item."

Berger and Daniels, who both act in the show, are sitting upstairs in the Studio's sun-filled atrium. (Gregory didn't make the trip and therefore isn't listed as a director here, but credit among the three longtime friends is fluid.) The fair-haired Daniels furrows his brow a lot; he has the serious face. Berger, sporting a soul patch, has the serious voice, a growl in Robert Mitchum's register. They are big, serious guys.

And morbid guys? (After all, "Charlie Victor Romeo" -- the title is the phonetic alphabet representation of CVR, cockpit voice recorder -- is drawn from "The Black Box: All-New Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-Flight Accidents," edited by Malcolm Macpherson. Survivors in the selected incidents are few.) Berger and Daniels don't see it that way. They're confident that their show -- depicting six incidents in all -- isn't lurid or exploitative, and the feedback they've had over the years backs them up.

Very early on, the Pentagon came calling and wanted to videotape the performance for training purposes. Berger, 39, recalls the moment proudly, with Daniels filling in details about the negotiation that took place on the Manhattan street outside the tiny theater while the 10 o'clock burlesque act shimmied in.

They hung the Pentagon contract in a theater window.

And then there is testimony from survivors themselves. Wayne and Donna Buxton were on American Airlines Flight 1572, a 1995 Connecticut crash depicted in "Charlie Victor Romeo," and they saw the show last month in Boston. Speaking from their home in western Massachusetts, the Buxtons tell their harrowing story in an occasionally choked rush -- how it was her first time flying. And how, as the plane lost engine power and hydraulic control in the wee hours of a stormy November night and began slamming into trees, he apologized and kissed her goodbye.

"I said, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' " Wayne Buxton, 54, recalls. "I was giving up because there were too many objects we were hitting, and the plane turned sideways in the air."

Donna Buxton, 53, broke down several times watching the show.