IF YOUR PUBERTY was spent devouring V.C. Andrews' Dollanganger novels -- the sweaty, incestuous tales of four dewy siblings locked in an attic by a selfish mother and terrifying grandmother -- some folks at Re-bar would like to have a word with you. Deflowered in the Attic, a winning spoof directed by Ed Hawkins, begins in High Camp gear and goes gamboling over the top again and again for the rest of the night. Some foreknowledge of the Flowers in the Attic series is ideal, but there is plenty here to cause your spleen bodily harm even without it.

"We had a way of indulging our desires too much," coos Deflowered's matriarch (Nick Garrison), and the show sets out to prove it, mercilessly drubbing Andrews' profane grandiloquence and rolling around in pop culture sound bites, malapropisms, non-sequiturs, and just plain old Carol Burnett-style silliness. "When did you get breasts?" a horny Christopher (the cheekily overripe Kevin Mesher) asks his pubescent sister Cathy (Imogen Love). She replies, "Thursday. You were napping." It's that kind of show.

Mesher and the hysterical Love wrote this shameless romp with Nicole Sarrocco, and all of the actors throw themselves at it with relish. The invaluable Garrison is, as usual, painfully funny and if Shane Wahlund (as the mutant Twins) and Matt Whitman (playing various characters) don't have quite enough to do, they're both uproariously willing. Then there is Gregory Musick's Grandmother. A post-modern kabuki nightmare (kudos to costumer Adam Arnold and ingenious wig master Kerby Genasci), Musick is fiendishly clever; this is an actor who knows the great comedic blessing of curses like "Devil's spawn."

Things do eventually lose their zip just before intermission. Hawkins' direction has more discipline than anyone has a right to expect in an outing with such wickedly low ambitions, but this type of show should be clocking in at no more than an hour and a half. Although a raucous humping done to Foreigner's oeuvre late in the second act is a highlight, the play's scrappy overlength really starts to wear it down.

Regardless, Deflowered's flash fire comic invention is worth pulling up a beer and reminding yourself that, thank God, your reading tastes blossom with age.

Deflowered Is Shameless Fun