Back to the (not medical) boards

On two nights in January, in a lecture hall in the Jane Ellen Hope Building, a dozen students in medicine, public health, law, and the Physician Associate Program forgot their studies and took on new roles. For the third year in a row, the Yale Med Players presented a night of one-act plays, this year adding the first act of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

The troupe started four years ago when then-first-year medical students Abigail Baird and Scott Hunter, theater buffs in high school, rekindled their interest in theater and staged a reading of The Doctor Stories by Richard A. Selzer, M.D., HS ’61. A year later, with support from Thomas P. Duffy, M.D., professor of medicine (hematology), and director of the Humanities in Medicine program, the group decided to perform Selzer’s plays.

Their production this year, “Lost in Transplantation,” deliberately eschewed medical themes. “We felt that we wanted to try something different, something really funny, so we picked comedies,” said Baird.