Professor puts science and creepiness into UCI play
Cast members rehearse a scene from “Elsewhere,” a six-person UCI Medical School drama produced by Professor Annie Loui, which premiered Thursday inside the UCI Medical Center next to the original morgue. The play runs through Halloween night.
As a Halloween treat, UC Irvine Professor Annie Loui combined her fascination for medical science and ethics to create a play on a particular subject that has provoked controversy and the imagination — cloning.
The theater professor’s production of “Elsewhere” premiered Thursday and will run until Halloween night at a lecture hall in the UCI School of Medicine.
“I adapted it based on a couple of different pieces of fiction,” Loui said. “It’s very much about asking ourselves what is ethical in terms of medicine but it’s also about this idea of identity. What are you meant to do in this world?”
The show is centered around students in a British boarding school overseen by teachers who constantly tell them they’re special and they must stay healthy. It then becomes clear that the students are being kept in the school so they may serve a sinister purpose yet to be revealed.
“They become donors,” cast member and UCI graduate student Maribel Martinez said. “And this can be a liver, a kidney or an eye taken from them… while they’re still alive.”
Martinez and her cast mates compare the roles of the students to “free-range chickens” that are raised to produce healthy eggs and meat.
The cast of six performs about a hundred roles in the production.
Loui, a professor of movement, had the cast act as the students, the teachers, trees, furniture and other inanimate objects. No sets or props were used during the show.
In the beginning of the production, a principal character plays through a “courtyard.” In this scene, three other students form a single file line and wave their arms to imitate the motion of water running through a fountain.
For the show, Loui selected five graduate students and one undergrad in UCI’s theater department, all of whom she has trained for about two years, she said.
Loui, the cast and crew have worked on the play for almost four weeks in the Grotowski Barn on campus.
To up the creep factor, Loui chose to perform the play in a campus building that was originally intended to house the med school’s morgue. The group began rehearsals there Saturday.
“It’s a play about bioethics, so I knew I wanted our location to be somewhere in the med school,” Loui said. “Then a friend of mine who teaches at the school told me he knew of the perfect place.”
The production is performed in one of the building’s lecture halls, a space that seats 200. The original morgue, which stands empty, serves as the dressing room for the cast.
“The hallway leading up to the room is very wide, almost like you can imagine the gurneys that would have gone through to that place,” Martinez said.
The last showing of the play will take place at 8 p.m. on Saturday in Tamkin Hall 110 on the UCI School of Medicine. Admission is free.
