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Reviewed by:
  • Charlie Victor Romeo
  • Lara D. Nielsen
Charlie Victor Romeo. Created by Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels, and Irving Gregory of Collective: Unconscious. Directed by Irving Gregory. P.S. 122, New York City. 15062004.

Charlie Victor Romeo is a shortwave handle for "CVR" in a system of phonetic spelling all pilots and radio amateurs use to designate call signs and location, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) identification system that situates this performance in the Cockpit Voice Recorder. The production returned to New York City in May 2004 for a four-month run after tours dating back to its 1999 debut on the Lower East Side. The program informs audiences that Charlie Victor Romeois "a live theatrical documentary," winning the 2000 New York International Fringe Festival awards for Overall Excellence in Drama and Outstanding Sound Design (by Jamie Mereness), the 2000 Drama Desk Awards for Best Unique Theatrical Experience and Outstanding Sound Design, and the 2000-01 US Department of Defense Visual Information Production Award for Creativity. Charlie Victor Romeohas toured the US in addition to stops in Perth and Tokyo. The production has been reviewed by almost all the national media, taped by the Air Force, and viewed live by West Point cadets as a pedagogical tool. The website (www.charlievictorromeo.com) boasts a letter of gratitude from US Air Force Major General Walter E. Buchanan III. Charlie Victor Romeohas been described by bewildered journalists as reality drama (though its creators saw the project as a repudiation of reality TV), postdramatic theatre, and horror show—or some combination of such popular if undefined lexicons for new trends in experimental theatre practices.

Situationist counterspectacle is a bid against aesthetic failure: it wants an avant-garde that rejects the formalities of drama, while seizing upon text itself as mapping the essential dynamics of event. Renouncing old ideas of "art," Charlie Victor Romeopresents a curated performance of textual documentary evidence, set in the im/mobile sterility of the cockpit. The script is made up of selections from the actual transcripts of cockpit voice recordings culled from the black boxes that rescue and reconnaissance teams need to solve the mysteries of what went wrong in airplane disasters. Sometimes highly compressed or stretched out in time, the texts are the stuff of human error, technical failures, and the multilayered interactions between each in crucial decision-making moments. Teams of forensic investigators decide what to include in these transcripts, and as such they are always already-mediated documents. Performed by Robert Berger, Ben Chinn, Patrick Daniels, Noel Dinneen, Irving Gregory, Christiaan Koop, luckydave, Debbie Troche, and Sam Walton, Charlie Victor Romeopresents six case studies of airline disasters in a ninety-minute performance that whittles down thousands of pages of transcripts to a core performance report. Narrative form, overtly rejected, rises again in the ordering of things: in the episodic curation of documents for the theatre. Documentary, after all, is less the domain of "truth [End Page 125]production," or any claim to the social, or to the real, than it is a keen manipulation of its effects.

The performance begins with an airline steward instructing the audience to fasten seatbelts, to study exit routes, to review correct oxygen mask technique. We know the drill. Before the lights go down we have been strapped into place for a theatre whose doubling rituals—in the auditorium, in the airplane—are so ordinary, so habitual, and yet suddenly, here in the familiarity of P.S. 122, so urgent that hearts beat hard with the dread of a singular spectatorial fear: powerlessness. Charlie Victor Romeostipulates some of its audiences are passive passengers who know nothing but the spectacle of flight. Neither pilots nor knowledgeable ticket buyers, they are senseless to the event. In good Brechtian spirit, Charlie Victor Romeoaims to change that passivity through performances that show pilots navigating the everyday cut between routine and disaster. I found this aspect of the work particularly moving, yet found no respite in my own piloting experiences. "We have control problems" is an utterance that alerts everyone to the urgency of skilled action, and to the question: how can the actions of one, two, three...

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