Alec Willis will play Jesus for the second time in his life in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”

His first time playing Jesus was in his high school’s production of “Godspell.”

“I always am very timid when playing Jesus because I don’t want to do something that is going to offend anyone, but also I want to play the character to the best of my ability,” the freshman said.

USI Theatre will show the musical comedy April 14-17 in the Performance Center.

During the spelling bee, the students have flashbacks about why they’re competing in the bee as other characters onstage play their family members.

“It just faces a lot of real-life problems but in a subtle way,” the theater arts major said.

Willis’s main character, Chip Tolentino, sings “Chip’s Lament,” a song about going through puberty, which Willis said is one of his favorite songs.

“(Tolentino’s) starting to realize the changes of his body,” he said. “He’s starting to realize what can happen when there’s an attraction of the opposite sex.”

He will also play a gay father in the show.

Willis’s close friend Emily March sings his other favorite song, “Woe is Me,” about the pressure her two dads (played by Willis and Craig Belwood) put on her to be perfect, how friends at school judge her for having gay parents and how she just wants America to love her.

March, a freshman, plays Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre, a liberal girl obsessed with politics, who wrote a Constitutional Amendment to lower the voting age to 10 and heads the Gay Straight Alliance at her elementary school.

Logainne’s last name is a combination of her two dads,’ Daniel Schwartz and Carl Grubenierre, last names.

“She’s very high-strung and she’s always super anxious about everything because of the pressure that her dad’s put on her,” the theater major said. “She always has to practice yoga because she has trouble breathing because of her anxiety.”

The musical is unconventional in every imaginable way, Director Eric Altheide said.

Much of the show is improvised, he said. The show is an ensemble, meaning each character has about equal time on stage and there is no real lead.

“There are four audience ‘volunteers’ that are brought on at the beginning of the show and they are forced to participate in the spelling bee,” he said. “There’s a lot of improvisation that builds around those audience members who are participating.”

The spelling bee pronouncer starts off giving these four audience members easy words such as “Mexican” or “bird.”

Before the show begins, the cast will instruct these audience members to always ask for the word’s definition and for the word in a sentence.

As the volunteers ask for definitions and sentences, the cast members will mock the volunteers and protest that they receive harder words than the audience members did.

Slowly, the audience members receive more difficult words and as each of them gets kicked out of the bee, the cast members will sing “Goodbye” to them.

The show has no official start signified by the house lights dimming and the pulling back of a curtain, Altheide said. It just begins.

“We’re trying to blur the lines between the audience and the cast even more, so there’s going to be a pre-show element to it whereas people are getting their tickets, they’re going to be seeing the kids registering for the spelling bee,” he said. “Also, if people are wanting to volunteer to be a part of the show, they need to get there early to do that.”

The theater chose the “Spelling Bee” because it’s lighthearted and a nice change from the last two musicals the theater has done, “Next to Normal” in 2014 and “Spring Awakening” in 2015, Altheide said.

“I’m beginning to realize that I guess as a young father, I tend to be drawn toward material that is about children and childhood,” he said. “I think that there was a kind of subconscious thing that drew me toward it.”

The characters in the play each have different tricks to help them spell words (such as writing out the words with their feet or using a puppet to spell out the words). Children in the real-life Scripps National Spelling Bee have little tricks like that as well, he said.

“Even by the time students start joining college, they begin to conform to a standard, to a be normal, to not stand out, to not get picked on, to not get beaten up, to walk kind of a normal line,” he said. “The show at its depth is kind of a celebration of the oddity of childhood.”

Fast Facts:

What: “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”

When: 7:30 p.m. on April 14-16, 2:00 p.m. on April 17

Where: Performance Center

Cost: $10 for USI students, $12 for USI employees, $13 for seniors (60+) and non-USI students, and $15 for adults