Nothing about WhAT Theatre’s upcoming show makes sense.

The words are backwards, the plot is backwards and male actors say lines written for female actors and vice versa. But the confusion — and the humor that results — is exactly the point of “slasreveR neveS,” which runs Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Huntington Beard Crouse Hall’s Gifford auditorium.

“There’s nothing realistic about this play,” said Alexis Cardwell, the show’s director. “And there’s nothing not funny about people moving and talking in reverse.”

The play, a series of seven vignettes, each with a different backwards storyline, is being put on by WhAT Theatre, a group for non-theater majors passionate about acting and performing.

“When we say the words are backwards we mean the words are literally backwards,” said Cardwell, a freshman inclusive elementary and special education and history double major.

Although a backwards play it is a hard concept to grasp, Cardwell said the first scenes ease the audience into the performance.

In the first vignette, the actors say some of their words backwards. In the second, two male actors read the lines of two female actors and vice versa. Other vignettes have the actors speak backwards in different languages. And for the finale, everything is completely backwards. The scene starts from the end and progresses backwards to the beginning — the actors even walk backwards.

WhAT Theatre was formed in 2006 as the Warehouse Architecture Theatre and only allowed architecture students to participate. Once it began accepting students outside of the School of Architecture, the path of the group changed entirely.

Keely Sullivan, a junior broadcast and digital journalism and French double major, and Jesper van den Bergh, a junior policy studies major, joined the group their freshman year and shortly after took control. Sullivan and van den Bergh rebranded the group as “WhAT Theatre” and became its president and vice president, as well as its producers.

This semester is the group’s first time performing on campus as WhAT Theatre, Sullivan said. Sullivan and van den Bergh were not shy in choosing the outlandish play, “slasreveR neveS,” but their main priority was to pick a manageable and enjoyable play for the cast and crew.

“slasreveR neveS” is a shorter play, runs about 40 minutes and has parts for five to 25 actors. WhAT Theatre’s production of the play includes 17 actors. The flexibility of the play was meant to attract more actors to WhAT Theatre in hopes that the group would expand even more for next semester, van den Bergh said.

“Even if we don’t have a bigger audience yet, what we do have is a bigger club and at the end of the day that’s the most important thing,” van den Bergh said.

The group is determined to continue the legacy of WhAT Theatre and expand it further next semester, Sullivan said. The group will perform two full-length shows, one of which is a musical.

In order to grow their presence on campus, WhAT Theatre has worked with other performance groups on campus, including First Year Players and Zamboni Revolution. These groups have helped with advertising, as well as performing musicals and improvisation.

Cardwell said all of these groups are rooting for the same team and have the same desire to offer opportunities for non-theater majors to perform on campus.

Cardwell believes that the unconventional nature of “slasreveR neveS” has bonded the WhAT Theatre group together, forced the actors to loosen up and meet new members with distinct personalities.

“The only way you can describe it is one big party. The show is quirky and fun and has all these extreme personalities that coexist in one place, and so do we,” Cardwell said. “We all function as one really dysfunctional person.”

Published on November 13, 2014 at 1:30 am

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