April 11, 2008

Is there a doctor in the house?

You bet. Real doctors and students impersonating doctors turned out to administer a strong dose of irreverent good humor, washed down with some infectious song and dance, during this year’s second year show.

Sonja Rakowski, Nicholas Villalon (in the middle) and Ernest Wright perform a skit from The Unaccreditables. As former Deputy Dean for Education Robert H. Gifford once said about the second year show, if students "worked as hard on their studies as they do on the show, they’d all be getting a Nobel Prize."

It’s an event in the life of a Yale medical student that ranks right up there with the White Coat ceremony, Match Day, Student Research Day and Commencement. Yet it has nothing to do with the study of medicine or the launch of a career – unless, of course, the student aspires to be the mad scientist in a regional production of Young Frankenstein.

This year’s second-year show – The Unaccreditables – upheld a medical school tradition that began in 1949 with the Four Years for What Follies (A Tragedy in Four Years), a series of skits performed by fourth-year students that took affectionate aim at chosen faculty members. The show remained the purview of fourth-year students for two decades before evolving into the second-year tradition it is today.

In keeping with the show’s hallowed history, this year’s production had fun at the expense of many faculty members, including Dean Robert Alpern, Associate Dean of Student Affairs Nancy Angoff, Deputy Dean of Education Richard Belitsky, Director of Admissions Richard Silverman and Director of the Clinical Skills Training Program Peggy Bia, who must be getting used to seeing herself portrayed on stage, having provided grist for Anna Deavere Smith in Let Me Down Easy at the Long Wharf Theatre earlier this year.

Though hardly at the level of Smith, some of the students were surprisingly skillful at capturing the trademark traits of their professors, including Sonja Rakowski as Peggy Bia, Katherine Rose as Angoff, Ernest Wright as Silverman, Matt Hornick as Belitsky and Kaveh Mansuripur as Professor of Internal Medicine Frank Bia, who retired at the end of 2007.

The show’s theme centered on the School of Medicine being a front for a Godfather-esque crime syndicate run by Frank Bia. When the school comes up for reaccreditation by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, its future is in doubt as some of its more unsavory practices are exposed, such as raising money through the production of medically-themed adult films.   

A team of about seven students, including Co-Executive Producer Hornick, began writing the script last November. The show, which Hornick calls a “multi-media extravaganza,” featured 10 videos, an equal number of skits, and many dances, all accompanied by songs. Musical accompaniment was provided by a 13-person orchestra performing 15 musical arrangements coordinated by Rakowski, Jimmy Martenson and Nicholas Villalon.  

During the two weeks leading up to the show, students rehearsed daily, sometimes late into the night. “I’ll admit that in the middle of it, a lot of us were saying, ‘Why do we have to do this now,’ says Hornick, “but it’s a very unifying experience. We had a lot of fun.”

As ingrained in the medical school culture as the second-year show has become, there was a time when it wasn’t the revered tradition it is today. In the 1950s, then-Dean Vernon W. Lippard threatened to ban it if students didn’t tone down the vulgarity, which, in one show, included students with concealed water bottles pretending to urinate on stage. The civil rights and anti-war era proved to be a turbulent time for the show as well as the nation. Some students found the show too frivolous given the somber social issues confronting the nation, while others chose to “question authority” by sharpening their faculty-directed humor to a cruel edge. Student interest began to wane, and in the late 1960s, some classes chose not to do a show.

Eventually it was logistics that doomed the fourth-year show as students started doing rotations at hospitals outside New Haven. But second-year classes filled the void, keeping alive the tradition of school-sanctioned irreverence. Over the years, successive classes have sanded down the show’s rougher edges, polished the production values and turned it into what is arguably another defining feature of the Yale system. 

“It’s a nice tradition, and something we’ll remember forever,” Hornick says. “It sort of rejuvenates everyone. I think we’re ready to get back to studying.”

—Jennifer Kaylin

Photo by Harold Shapiro

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