WELCOME TO THE FUNHOUSE
A Horror One-Act Play by George Cameron Grant
Bobby just wants a happy family. Or else.
It’s breakfast time in a picture-perfect American home. Mom is making pancakes. Dad is getting ready for work. And their son Bobby wants nothing more than for his family to sit down together and be happy.
Except this isn't Bobby's family.
Behind the grotesquely smiling mask of a grown man is a frightened little boy who remembers another breakfast table, another mother and father—and a childhood filled with alcoholism, anger and abuse. Now Bobby is determined to recreate the family life he was denied, and his unwilling participants had better get every detail right.
Because Bobby doesn't like mistakes.
As past and present begin to collide, we discover the damaged child beneath the monster—and the horrifying logic behind what he has become. Bobby believes children deserve parents who love them, listen to them and make them feel safe.
And he has developed his own terrifying way of dealing with the ones who don't.
WELCOME TO THE FUNHOUSE is a darkly comic psychological horror play about childhood trauma, memory and the terrible consequences of carrying an old nightmare into adulthood. What begins like an impossibly cheerful 1950s family sitcom gradually fractures into something much darker, where pancakes are imaginary, parents are replaceable—and Bobby gets to decide who deserves to go home.
You can take the boy out of the nightmare. But can you take the nightmare out of the boy?
4M; 3F, Doubling possible. Approximately 25 minutes.
Part of the WELCOME TO THE FUNHOUSE Collection of Horror Tales.