Annie Loui Sees the Sky Falling in ‘Paradise’ : Stage: Her multimedia performance piece at UC Irvine challenges perceptions of what Orange County is.

Is Southern California the Go-West promised land of natural beauty, wide-open spaces and limitless prosperity? Or is it an overcrowded, overdeveloped, over-hyped landfill awaiting the Final Quake?

What’s myth? What’s real?

Those are questions UC Irvine assistant drama professor Annie Loui hopes audiences ponder when they see “Another Day in Paradise: The California Project,” a multimedia performance piece she’s conceived, directed and co-written. The hourlong production runs tonight through Saturday night at UCI’s Fine Arts Gallery.

Spoken word, movement, film clips, giant slide projections, dramatic lighting and an original score incorporating deafening bulldozers--Loui deploys them all to fire off a fearless anti-development, pro-environmental missive.

Actors portray a dangerously cocky character that Loui said is modeled after Irvine Co. chairman Donald Bren, and another she based on Joan Irvine Smith, great-granddaughter of James Irvine, the firm’s founder. Smith, who once owned 20% of the company’s stock, lately prefers to look at old paintings of the area when it was pristine coastal land, rather than the now-developed community itself, says Loui.

As one who is more prone to giggling mischievously than picketing, Loui asserts she isn’t out to vilify anyone or rally converts.

“I’m just trying to let people draw their own conclusions,” says Loui, known for her experimental theater work. “I’m just presenting information. What I really don’t think people see very clearly is the reality of the situation and the faux reality that’s being pasted on top of it.”

Six UCI drama students will perform “Another Day in Paradise.” Michael Roth, resident composer at the La Jolla Playhouse, wrote its score. Some of its text is fictional sequences she co-wrote with Klaus Lintzinger (who produced the 1991 Liv Ullman film “Mindwalk”), whom she met last summer while he was filming another movie on location at UC Irvine. (Loui’s previous UCI productions include “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” (1993), and “The Almond Seller” (1994).)

But much of the script is composed of statistics Loui mined from development company brochures, California Office of Tourism publications, the U.S. Census, newspapers, an Environmental Impact Report for an Irvine coast planned community and other sources.

The Bren character, for instance, named only “Chairman,” speaks words attributed to Bren, Loui said, in a newsletter of the Newport Coast development: Expect “panoramic daytime vistas, stirring sunsets, the nighttime twinkle of city lights,” the “Chairman” says. A fictional character identified as an Irvine Co. exec named “Jack” adds that “a large percentage of this development is designated open space.”

Meanwhile, a slide read aloud by a narrator reveals that, “Of the open-space allocation of this development, only one-quarter is designated wilderness.” Other slides, intercut with images of rolling hills, assert that “the Newport Coast development is built on top of 17 ancient landslides” and that more than “2,000 houses” will be built on those hills “within three years.”

Loui vividly remembers the first time she saw those hills between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach north of Pacific Coast Highway before she moved here three years ago from Boston. She had done stints there as resident choreographer at American Repertory Theater and drama-dance instructor at Brandeis and Harvard universities. She previously studied with UCI’s experimental-theater maven Jerzy Grotowski and French mime master Etienne Decroux.

“You notice how incredibly beautiful it is naturally,” she said, “but then, you notice how incredibly abused it’s being by the people living here.”

In fact, her daily drive between UCI and her home in Laguna Beach, which takes her right by the Newport Coast development, inspired her new play. It begins with a short history of Southern California and Orange County and involves Native Americans, Spanish missionaries and Victorian-era frontier theory from Frederick Jackson Turner.

“It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek,” Loui said. “I don’t mean this to be a history lesson. But (by looking back) you start to realize that people have always wanted to be here, and there’s always been this sense that this is the place to go to expand, to get a farm, to do this or that. It was true in the rancho era, it was true in the Victorian era.”

The play abruptly lurches into the modern era with loud rock music, film footage of crowded freeways and more statistics.

“From 1960 to 1970, the population of Orange County doubled” to 1.4 million, the narrator says. “From 1970 to 1980 it increased by one-half million; from 1980 to 1990, it increased by another half million.”

“If you keep piling it up,” Loui said, “what are you finally going to end up with except a lot of people on top of each other in a place that’s prone to earthquakes and (the site of) ancient landslides?”

“Another Day in Paradise” ends with another uniquely Orange Countian catastrophe--its recent bankruptcy filing, which causes the clearly disturbed Chairman to drop three oranges he’d been juggling effortlessly.

“You’ve got this buildup of all this hype of the (county’s) glorious beauties,” Loui said, “and then the bottom falls out. So what substance is there? What’s this really built on? This is unstable ground in a lot of ways.”

* “Another Day in Paradise: The California Project” runs tonight through Saturday at 8 and 10 p.m. in the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery, Fine Arts Complex, off Bridge Road. Admission is free, but tickets are required. (714) 824-2787.