The Arden Theatre presents E.B. White’s ‘Charlotte’s Web’

For the uninitiated, E.B. White’s 1952 novel follows runty piglet Wilbur, who narrowly escapes the axe. Farmer’s daughter Fern argues that death by chopping is a terrible injustice, and her parents give her the piglet. (His siblings go speedily to the slaughter for which they were destined.) Later, the family decides to kick this particular can down the road by sending Wilbur to Aunt Edith and Uncle Homer Zuckerman’s farm. Wilbur learns the truth about his impending slaughter — until Charlotte, a kind spider, determines to save him by weaving laudatory words about him into her web.

The barnyard players

This production, from an adaptation by Joseph Robinette, stars a warm, nimble ensemble of nine. MacLaughlin’s concept takes ample opportunity to incorporate stunned-but-willing audience kiddos into the action. Adam Howard stars as Wilbur, trading some of the literary swine’s earnest oratorical flourishes and genuine pathos for slapstick antics and a fatuous mien.

As Fern, Campbell O’Hare balances the book’s poignant theme of childhood tipping into adolescence as fast as a ride on the Ferris wheel. Alex Bechtel provides supporting notes as farmer John Arable and the Gander, and via a mellow, plaintive oboe.

He partners with Alex Keiper as Martha Arable and the boisterous, motherly Goose. Brian Anthony Wilson plays Zuckerman, but really gets into it as prize pig Uncle, resplendent in a giant peachy blazer.

J. Hernandez brings wily swagger to the self-interested rat Templeton. Petite aerialist Ayana Strutz, as Charlotte, enters in a plunge from the catwalk on silks, drawing gasps from all ages. She makes cartwheels look as easy as walking, and her gravity-defying performance embodies the beauty as well as the innate creep factor of a spider benefactor (especially when she scuttles around on her hands and feet with her spine bent backwards, chin and tummy in the air).

Strutz’s fluid, well-rounded performance gives welcome contemporary color to Charlotte’s musing that if she can fool a bug, she can certainly fool a man. And she’s right: Homer immediately overrides his wife, who suggests that the spider, not the pig, is the extraordinary party in this scenario.

Down in the dirt

Amanda Wolff’s costumes anthropomorphize the animals: Wilbur wears a pink button-down shirt and suspenders, while the Goose dons a frilly apron (though Keiper and Bechtel toss perfectly choreographed handfuls of feathers when the geese get overwhelmed). Only Hernandez boasts a tail as Templeton, a natural look with his trenchcoat.

As a lover of the novel, I was always curious about whether Zuckerman’s animals conceal their human qualities or the humans just can’t understand them. This question must be answered onstage, and MacLaughlin’s cast employs much intermittent waddling and crawling.

The whole ensemble gets progressively grimier throughout the show, with an ingenious straw-scattered square of real dirt anchoring David Gordon’s set. His airy wooden beams put the audience right into the barn, with a rustic sawdust smell (a floral scent, which the cast pours onto paddles and waves throughout the audience, is far less welcome to anyone with perfume allergies — you’ve been warned).

Where’s Charlotte?

The timeless, disarmingly sophisticated rhythm of E.B. White’s prose, with its wry, beautifully characterized voices, sometimes gets lost in this script’s spoon-fed moralizing and songs about a life well lived. Plus, in a bizarre musical interlude, Uncle the pig sings lustily about the parts of his body people will eat. Adults may find this production both treacly and horrifying in a way the novel was not.

After Thom Weaver’s lights tastefully faded to black over the ailing spider on opening night, the toddler behind me demanded, “Where’s Charlotte?” approximately every 40 seconds for the final scenes.

Well, now, kid. Charlotte labored herself to the point of death on behalf of a young man — er, pig — whose main pastime is napping. She expired alone, of exhaustion and old age, in an abandoned fairground, after achieving her final Darwinian feat.

Wilbur, in a flourish of exceptionalism perhaps unparalleled in American literature, is spared. So I get the confusion, little ones. But no one is putting Charlotte’s Web to bed anytime soon.