The unlikely friendship between a pig and a spider takes center stage March 16-19 as Theater AUG and the Department of Art and Design present E.B. White’s classic children’s story, Charlotte’s Web, at the Maxwell Performing Arts Theatre.

The play, adapted and directed by Melanie Kitchens O’Meara, PhD, focuses on the charming tale of a lovable pig named Wilbur, who is saved from slaughter and forms a deep friendship with a spider named Charlotte.

“I wanted to do a novel that people would get excited about and we could bring everybody to campus and even invite local elementary schools to come see the show,” said O’Meara, an associate professor of performance studies in the Department of Art and Design at Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Augusta University.

“So many people that I have talked to are just like, ‘I love this book. This was such a pivotal book for me as a child. I remember it.’ And I feel the same way about Charlotte’s Web. So that was one of the reasons that I wanted to do this play and see what I could do with it.”

While O’Meara enjoys the dramatic dialogue between the barn animals and the 8-year-old girl, Fern Arable, who lives on the farm with her family, she also values the narrator’s voice in her version of this play.

“To me, that’s the beautiful stuff in the book, so I wanted to keep the narrator’s voice to paint those pictures for my audience, but also have the dialogue, which is exciting,” O’Meara said, adding that this version of the story has a unique take on the narrator that lends to a surprising twist at the end of the play. “It is important to me to maintain that voice and find creative ways to do it. And I think this was a fun approach.”

O’Meara also wanted to recreate the meticulous spiderwebs Charlotte makes throughout the novel during the performance.

Avery Lewis, a senior majoring in the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Digital and Visual Storytelling program at Augusta University, is a narrator in the play. Throughout the performance, she knits an enormous scarf that stretches across the entire stage.

“I have always sewn and I feel like sewing naturally leads to knitting, so this summer, I bought a pair of knitting needles and I was going to learn, but then school started, so I put them down,” Lewis said. “Then, over Christmas break, I decided I wanted to make something, so I started watching a bunch of YouTube videos on knitting and I brought some knitting needles into class and Dr. O’Meara noticed.”