Crikey, I managed to catch the last night of “Charles Victory Romeo” at the Collective Unconscious. If you haven’t heard of this show, it was big in the 90s in this tiny lower east side theater when NPR did a feature on it. In a nutshell, it’s a reenactment of the recordings from the black box placed in airplane cockpits in planes that crashed. I think CVR stands for “cockpit voice recorder.” When it came out, places like Delta and American Airlines were buying out shows for their staff. The show works with the Air Force with training their folks, and it’s won all sorts of awards.
It was…a good show, but I’m like totally scarred and I no longer want to go on a plane. People, I have a flight in two weeks, which I now want to bail on. Why did I go see the show?!!
I tried to explain to Husband why it was effective. At first, I think b/c the actors are impersonating people you know are dead or might be dead were particularly willy-inducing, and just the fact that at least in some of the scenarios, HUNDREDS of people did die. That’s CRAZY. And when they do theater based on real life, parts of it get boring, and you don’t necessarily get a strong sense of character from the text, but this show is totally about the scenario, man, which is traumatizing. You cannot help, I think, but imagine what it would be like for you to be on that flight and see it all come apart, b/c there are a few moments before you lose consciousness where you see something horrific that boggles your mind and you can’t believe it’s happening to you, right?