'Paperback Dreadful' at FringeArts Festival

I can't think of anyone who actually likes ventriloquist dummies, but the author R.L. Stine really ruined them for me when I was about ten years old. I don't remember how Night of the Living Dummy II made it onto my childhood shelf -- hand me down? Garage sale? -- but I'll never forget Slappy.

In Stine's books, Slappy the ventriloquist dummy makes his way into the hands of some unwitting child. A magic spell tucked in his pocket brings Slappy to life. He's responsible for a series of chilling incidents, including smacking the children's parents, vomiting on school kids, truly nefarious jokes and walking out of the closet at night all by himself. I'm still haunted by the sound of Slappy's feet coming down the hallway in the middle of the night -- or at least how I imagined they'd sound.

Stine was a prolific writer of humor books and magazines for children well before he hit gold in the 1990s with his Goosebumps, a series of spine-tingling chapter books with titles like It Came From Beneath the Sink!, The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight and Beware, the Snowman. Every American child of the '90s was caught reading Stine's books after lights-out at least once.

Apprentices no more

So when I saw a tribute to Stine listed in this year's Fringe Festival catalog, I couldn't miss it. Paperback Dreadful is the brainchild of Shannon House, a new theater company founded by recent alumni of the Arden Theatre's Professional Apprenticeship program. These former apprentices, in collaboration with a few local improv professionals, developed the show. Four of those creators -- Shanna Tedeschi, Dave Piccinetti, Lizzie Spellman and Bryan Kerr -- performed it in the Arden's main lobby with nothing but a few chairs and their own delightful exuberance.

Paperback Dreadful is a send-up of Stine's childhood horror clichés, complete with monstrous apparitions, sinister wishes granted and inevitable twist endings. The production consists of four zany mini-plays performed in alternating installments, interspersed with charmingly bizarre dance breaks and a poem about Oreos and grave dirt that 's composed afresh every night (the poem, not the dirt).

Haunted sibling

-- In "Nightmare on the Pitcher's Mound," a blithe young ballplayer finds a mysterious glove at Kablamo's Pawn Shop; "you'll pay the price later!" the proprietor assures her.

-- In "Side Effects May Include Monsters," a terminally geeky pre-teen swallows a pill from his therapist that turns everyone he sees into a terrible ghoul.

-- In "It Came from the Ouija Board," an unfortunate boy is haunted by his mocking big brother.

-- And in "The Ravemaster's Curse," an amorous young girl is spurned by her best friend and takes her revenge with the help of mysterious powers she finds at a rave that night.

Death and divorce

Upon arriving in the Arden lobby, audience members were invited to write their worst childhood fear on a slip of paper and deposit it in a box. During an interlude (too brief), the actors improvised tableaux of the fears they pulled out of the box. Last weekend, audience fears included "Columbo from the TV show" and "spiky seed pods from trees."

Stine is an expert at marshaling fears of evil scarecrows, scientific experiments gone awry, or demonic toys. But the Paperback Dreadful performers acknowledge things that kids are actually afraid of -- the sort of traumas that never would have appeared in a Goosebumps book, like the death of a sibling, their parents' divorce, or being an outcast at school.

"We dug deep into the drafty attics and creepy basements of our own selves," the creators say in the program, "to explore what it's like to a vulnerable child surrounded by the horrors of our own imaginations and real lives." The result is a riotous salute to childhood fears and triumphs that achieves its mission without a single prop.