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By Suneal Kolluri

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

As ill-fated airplanes malfunction in midair and pilots desperately attempt to land, small recording devices called the Cockpit Voice Recorders, also known as “black boxes,” capture the intense sounds that resonate throughout the airplane.

Needless to say, the black boxes of these crashed airplanes contain some of the most chilling and dramatic real-life dialogue ever recorded.

“Charlie Victor Romeo,” a theatrical documentary coming to UCLA’s Macgowan Little Theater on Wednesday, is formed entirely of six transcripts recorded by black boxes that have been recovered from various airplane crashes.

According one of the creators of the play, Irving Gregory, the show has thus far elicited incredibly intense reactions from audiences.

“Our show is like a thriller, it leaves people stunned and shocked,” he said from New York during a recent interview. “After certain scenes, I can hear a lot of gasps from the audiences … it’s an intense theatrical experience.”

This theatrical documentary, created by Gregory, Bob Berger and Patrick Daniels, opened in October of 1999 and was originally going to run for only five weeks. The enthusiastic response from audiences, however, convinced the show’s creators to continue to perform it for audiences across the United States.

“We were initially going to run the show for 20 shows,” Daniels said. “As soon as we started we realized we had to extend. People were calling and the phone was ringing off the hook.”

The setup is simple. Eight actors perform the six different airplane catastrophes on a set consisting only of the nose of an airplane of a common commercial airline.

Coming up with the idea and getting the play off the ground, however, was a much more complicated process.

The idea’s conception began in 1999 when the play’s three creators had involved themselves in a discussion about the Y2K craze and its relation to the media’s obsession with shock value.

“We were talking about how Y2K relates to the sort of exploitation in the media of sex and violence, this conversation was ongoing and we were all sort of engaged in it,” Daniels said.

When in a book store, Berger showed Gregory a book of cockpit voice recorder transcripts as an example of books that are marketed for their shock value.

As the two read the accounts of the crashes, Berger than suggested that they make a play on this topic.

Berger, Gregory and Daniels thus began the lengthy process of making their idea a reality.

“The three of us sort of took it from there and chose a general group of transcripts that we thought were good to do as a theater piece,” Daniels said. “We picked the performers that we wanted to be in the thing. We were talking about how you might make a set, how you might do the lights, what kind of audio you might supply – we just came up with it and jumped.”

Due to the small size of their performing group, Collective: Unconscious, Berger, Gregory, and Daniels all had to perform multiple tasks in putting together the play.

“We’re also performers,” said Gregory. “We’re a small operation so we got to do all that we can.”

The three were in charge of financial aspects, interviews, the set design, production and much more.

In organizing the play, the creators recognized the seriousness of their endeavor and always made sure to be respectful of those who died in the crashes.

“Reading the transcripts, we were thinking, ‘God, this is very serious stuff.’ We had to take it seriously and produce it with an eye to make it sort of reverent rather than taking advantage of the subject matter,” Daniels said.

Nonetheless, Daniels said that various individuals voiced their disgust about the subject matter of the documentary and viewed its creators as exploiting the deaths of the airplane passengers.

“Some people have argued that we have sort of exploited it to an extent,” Daniels said. “It’s an exploitation to a degree regardless of what you do, but we were trying as much as possible to be very careful and respectful of the people who died. The people that bring that up as a major issue are generally people who haven’t seen the play.”

The play has been well received, however, by audiences across the country. It won many awards including $50,000 for the “Absolut Angel Arts and Technology Award.”

The past two years, the troupe performed the play to groups in the aviation and medical communities as an educational tool.

“When people told me that ‘Charlie Victor Romeo’ was a potentially life-saving performance and that perhaps life-saving technology could be developed out of it, it took my breath away,” Berger said. “I never expected to be at use at that hitch.”

Daniels hopes that the portrayal of the plane’s passengers as heroes will rid viewers of any negative views they may have brought with them to the show.

“People bring their own set of expectations to the table when they come to see the show. Generally speaking, we’re sort of dashing those and replacing them with another set, which is something very simple and more or less portrays all of the people as heroes. They’re trying to save their own lives, first and foremost, but they’re also fighting to keep the plane in the air and fighting to save all the passengers’ lives as well.”

THEATER: “Charlie Victor Romeo” opens on Wednesday and runs through July 15 at Macgowan Little Theater. Performances are at 8 p.m. and cost $35 for general admission and $12 for UCLA students with a valid BruinCard. Tickets can be purchased at Central Ticket Office. For more information or to charge tickets by phone call (310) 825-2101.