Arachnids Anonymous

Arachnids Anonymous is a short, illustrated play for children, young adults, and people of all ages. It is a three-act comedy with black and white illustrations depicting the members of Arachnids Anonymous, a support group of eight arachnids, as they discuss and pitch ideas on how to solve their main problem: how to get other creatures (such as humans) to like them so that they can all live in peace and harmony. Each of the eight members are uniquely depicted based on age, species, and temperament. Most of the members are spiders, but there are a couple of surprising arachnids mixed in with the group. Each member pitches suggestions on what can be done to solve their problem, and eventually, a single course of action is decided upon. They decide that the best way to not appear scary and menacing is to look silly and ridiculous instead. The members go to meet a praying mantis (an insect, not an arachnid) that has the ability to create the silly-looking disguises that they need. Afterward, they travel to an aquarium with the goal of testing out their disguises, but are met with a surprising turn of events. The story ends on with a mild cliffhanger, which is meant for the reader to think about what could happen next.

As a play, Arachnids Anonymous is very lax regarding a play’s proper font and formatting. It was intended to be a combination of a traditional fictional children’s book with a short, three-act play in which all people can listen to, read, and or act out. The story is sprinkled with educational tidbits about arachnids and has the illustrations drawn in black and white so that children with mild to severe color blindness can enjoy the pictures without feeling like they would be missing out on colorized pictures. The amount of dialogue and its complexity corresponds to the characters themselves, so that the readers or actors can choose which character they want to act out based on those constraints. For example, there are two characters that have less than four lines of dialogue throughout the whole story, but there also are a couple of characters that have a few long-winded monologues. And although people of all ages can enjoy this story, the estimated reading level for Arachnids Anonymous ranges from 3rd grade to 6th grade.