With its latest show, the Westside theater department pulled at the crowd’s heartstrings and had it on the ground laughing for the entirety of the two-hour show, Thursday, Dec. 4 through Saturday Dec. 6.

The show began with 10 individual events that ranged from singing to soliloquies, with performers of all grades.

One of these individual events involved Westside’s Improv Team, including seniors Kacey Rose, Jessica Hrbek, and Max Tierney, juniors Zach Bowen and Amy Conway, and sophomore Robert Gabel.

In this event, audience members were asked to give the team a place, an object and an occupation. They then had to make a scene out of these random things. At one point, the team had to connect the terms tree, Washington and a swimsuit model and ended with Tierney posing as a swimsuit model at the top of a tree in Washington state, which had the audience members hysterically laughing.

The second half of the show included a thirty-minute show called The Complete History of America. The theater department took this half of the play to districts Saturday, Dec. 6 and received 13 outstanding performer awards.

At districts, if the play ran longer than a half hour, it was disqualified. Originally, this play was an hour and 45 minutes long and had to be cut down. But what makes this play different than others they have done before is the actors had a big say in what happened during the play.

“In fact, lots of times in rehearsals we would only get through a page because people were just coming up with stuff,” director Jeremy Stoll said. “This was just as much the students’ creation as my own.”

The end product was a half hour flying through the complete history of the United States that ranged in raps about the 16^th century to bringing you inside a World War I trench as the actors shot Nerf guns.

“[The show] went so good,” Hrbek said. “It was by far the best one we’ve had so far. Our audience was so responsive and really awesome. The energy was great and we had a blast.”