Medical Drama : Education: A play about AIDS is performed at the USC school of medicine ‘to put a human face on the disease.’ Attendance was mandatory for first- and second-year students.

On Wednesday, the raging queens came to USC Medical School. Also the disco bunnies, punks, junkies and other assorted characters.

They were a troupe of 30 actors--including Dennis Christopher, Holly Woodlawn and several others recognizable from their television and movie roles--who performed the play “Elegies . . . for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens” for the students.

By New York-based writer Bill Russell, the play is a highly political, sometimes raunchy, series of monologues and songs about AIDS.

“I wanted the students to learn to put a human face on the disease,” said Dr. Eric Cohen, director of USC’s Introduction to Clinical Medicine program.

Cohen, who said that as far as he knew this was the first time a play had been made part of the medical school curriculum, declared attendance mandatory for all first- and second-year students.

“It always has been my belief that medical education is too intellectually oriented,” he said. “Students arrive here with passion and caring, and we then do our best to train that out of them with all the facts and procedures we pound into them.

“My belief about the arts is that they cut right through our intellectual veneer and get to the soul, and that is what we need to do.”

Cohen saw the play--in which several characters who died from AIDS come back to life to tell their stories--at its first local performance at the Canon Theater in Beverly Hills last October. He had been invited there by an actor in the production, David Oliver, who had graduated from USC.

“He was my doctor when I was going to school, and I thought he would be interested,” said Oliver as he put on his makeup in a men’s room on the medical school’s East Los Angeles campus.

After that performance, Cohen told Oliver that he wanted to do the play at the school. Director Ken Page, best known for his appearances on Broadway in “Cats” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” approved the idea, as long as it could be done in a professional manner with proper lights and sound.

Even though none of the actors or crew were to be paid, the budget for the one performance in a lecture hall came to about $7,000. USC agencies chipped in $3,000 and the rest was donated by Cohen.

Before the show, the actors--who had only done performances of the show at benefits--were excited.

“This is one of the most important performances I’ll ever do,” said Don Amendolia, who on “Twin Peaks” played the sleazy department store manager. His character in the play is that of an “average Joe” who contracts the AIDS virus from a one-time visit to a prostitute.

“As I say in the play, ‘A virus is not picky where it grows.’ ”

Most of the characters in the play are gay men, and just last year a survey by the American Medical Assn. showed that nearly a third of primary-care physicians feel uncomfortable with homosexuality and would prefer not to treat AIDS patients.

“Some of the (characters) in this play might be outrageous to students not used to being in contact with gay men,” Cohen said, “but the human side of these men in the play is very obvious.”

The most outrageous of the characters--Holly Woodlawn as a drag performer and Robert Jacobs as a flamboyant man who suffers from “panel envy” because he doesn’t approve of his design in a memorial AIDS quilt--got the biggest laughs from the students. And in the end there was a standing ovation.

Cohen and the cast were obviously elated. But the payoff came later in discussion groups as students gathered with cast members to talk about their reactions.

“I have interviewed several AIDS patients in the hospital,” said first-year student Monica Heath, 29. “But it never touched me like this. It just hit me during the play that these people have lives, friends, family.

“Sometimes that’s easy to forget.”