By Anne Washburn. Directed by Joanna Garfinkel. A TigerMilk Collective production. At the PAL Theatre on Wednesday, April 23. Continues until May 3

Brooklyn, New York–based playwright Anne Washburn’s script Apparition is about horror, the faceless fears and well-formed demons that haunt us. Unfortunately, in this production from the TigerMilk Collective, it’s almost never scary.

In part, that’s the fault of the script, which is too disjointed and self-conscious to sustain suspense. The text flits from one scenario to the next: a man talks to the ghost of a woman he’s murdered, various characters retell Macbeth in colloquial language, two figures babble in fake Latin, and so on.

The play is largely descriptive, and great chunks of the writing are boring. Near the end, one hapless actor has a monologue that’s almost two pages long. Here’s a sample. Feel free to skim: “I turned. I said: ‘they were sitting there, right there, in that chair’. I said that, I said—aloud—tho I was alone—I said ‘they were sitting right there in that chair’. Which, what would I know about that, what, where they were.” To her great credit, Lindsay Drummond seems to access true emotion while performing this muddle.

Other bits attempt to be clever and fail. How funny is it to say, “Nubble Tubble/Oily Rubble/Dire Turn and/Toasty Mubble”? And the pretend Latin is dumb.

Some genuinely spooky stuff does emerge. Miranda Huba has a monologue about moving into an apparently haunted apartment. It gave me gooseflesh. And Lindsay Reoch and Kirsten Slenning play out a gruesome little scene in which a devil tries to convince a beast that haunts suburbia to graduate from eating small pets to eating babies.

Some critics loved Apparition in its New York City mounting. That production must have had the benefit of tremendous design. Those elements are okay here, but they don’t make the script come to life.

Mostly, this show didn’t work for me, and I’m easy to creep out.