On Theater:

When UC Irvine professor Annie Loui began hiking the trails near her home in the Silverado Canyon, she hardly expected to find material for her latest stage production.

“I often took the beautiful and steep Blue Light Mine Trail, known locally as Tecnu after the poison oak medication,” she recalled. “When I told my neighbors where I was hiking, they would say, ‘Oh, we don’t go up there after the accident.’”

Further investigation revealed that shortly before Loui relocated to Silverado in 2002, three teenagers hiked in that remote and rugged area of the Santa Ana Mountains, and only one returned. At the mine entrance now rests a sign: “Danger: Methane Gas: In honor of Glenn and Nick Anderson.”

The story of those young men will be told at UCI this weekend and next in “Blue Light,” written by Loui’s colleague at UCI, English professor Michelle Latiolais, directed by Loui and presented in the university’s Studio Theater.

“The project was developed over a nine-month period with the participation of writer, video designer and choreographer/director with an experimental workshop showing in the spring of 2009 and using a small group of UCI graduate actors,” Loui said.

Playwright Latiolais found her task particularly challenging.

“There have been difficulties with writing a play that both honors the lives of Nick and Glenn Anderson and portrays them honestly and with some of the conflicting traits that make up any life,” she said. “Annie Loui’s vision for ‘Blue Light’ was big, more technically dimensional than almost anything ever mounted at UCI.

“But I realized early that I had the job of creating character — living, breathing human lives that are never simple, and yet compared to the visual feast that is this show, they seemed simple, or quiet or backgrounded,” she said.

What emerges from the creative vision of these two women is an inter-media format, intermingling video, live performers, dialogue, dance and music to tell the story. The script from the June workshop production doubled, as did the number of actors.

Also added were costumes, sound design and what Loui termed “an extraordinary mountain” — 70,000 kerf cuts made on wooden boards in the UCI production shop to create the many-layered, contoured hillside that looms above the stage action, as “a constant reminder of the place where it all happened,” she says.

At UCI, the two mine victims, Glenn and Nicholas Anderson, will be played by Ryan Welsh and Jesse Easley. Their grieving mother Terry is portrayed by Tracy Hazas, while the survivor, Matt Murphy, is played by Mikkei Fritz.

“It has been both an honor and an education to work with director Annie Loui, who trusted me with her idea for this play and allowed me the chance to help bring it to the stage,” Latiolais said. “I also thank Terry Kling, the mother of Nick and Glenn, for her generosity of spirit in allowing us to create a show from what must remain for her a terrible loss.”

In other theater news, Broadway star Kelli O’Hara will perform this weekend in the Cabaret Series of the Orange County Performing Arts Center. O’Hara — who starred in “The Light in the Piazza,” “The Pajama Game,” “My Fair Lady” and the acclaimed revival of “South Pacific,” will be featured tonight through Sunday in the Center’s Samueli Theater.

Tickets are $72 and available at OCPAC.org, at the center’s box office at 600 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa, or by calling (714) 556-2787.

If You Go

What: “Blue Light”

Where: Studio Theater at UC Irvine

When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, with 2 p.m. Saturday matinees through Jan. 30

Call: (949) 824-2787

TOM TITUS reviews local theater for the Daily Pilot. His reviews appear Fridays.