Patrons are greeted by the music of Phil and Gaye Johnson. Then curtain up, and the audience sees a barn’s flying rafters, hay bales, fences, a pig trough, ladders, platform levels and filling the upstage of the Tryon Fine Arts Center, a huge metal spider web. This can mean only one play: E. B. White’s beloved children’s tale “Charlotte’s Web” as dramatized under White’s guidance by Joseph Robinette.

This is the fifth year the Tryon Little Theater and Tryon Youth Center have partnered to produce a summer play in which the entire cast is ages 8 to12. Starting back in 1970 the Youth Center began producing one show each summer for young actors aged 8 to 21. Finally in 2006 it was decided to do a second production each summer which could really feature the younger kids.

A cast of 40 versatile kids as pigs, spiders, a rat, geese, a gander, goslings, sheep, a lamb, cats, various barnyard animals, and oh yes, humans, interact on Lindsey Moore’s fluid set which will change right before the audience’s eyes, with Mike Carruth’s steel spider web filling TFAC upstage.

Directed by veteran youth director Marianne Carruth, “Charlotte’s Web” has been costumed by Lynn Costine (after all you try designing believable costumes for spiders, pigs, geese, etc. Not easy!).

Performances at TFAC are Thursday and Friday, July 29 and 30 at 8 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, July 31 and August 1 at 3 p.m. Tickets are available at the TLT Workshop from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. through Saturday, or by calling 859-2466. Tickets will also be available at TFAC prior to each performance.

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