Southern-Fried Extraterrestrials

The Kentucky Goblin Siege represents all the worst and best qualities of an Off-Off-Broadway show. Based on a real-life incident in the Bluegrass State during the summer of 1955, Jeff Sproul’s script constantly gets in the way of the production’s ramshackle charm.

Turning the “most well-documented sightings of alleged extra-terrestrial beings in U.S. history” into a 90-minute comedy was a fun idea—particularly since Sproul has taken the real people involved and exaggerated them into satire. So we have a beatnik daughter (Alicia Barnatchez), a long-suffering girlfriend with a drawl so thick it sounds as if she’s speaking through a mouth of molasses (Alexis Robbins) and a classic steel magnolia in Christine Sullivan’s matriarch, Glennie Lankford. Not to mention the hoity-toity visiting Yankee, played by Michele McNally with the proper Bryn Mawr lockjaw.

Director Lindsey Moore, however, treats the characters to which Sproul has given emotional plotlines with a very different hand. Husband and wife Billy Ray (Jeremy Banks) and June (Sabrina Farhi) seem entirely out of place, with their quiet suffering as new parents—particularly Farhi, who comes across as an anachronistic Park Slope mother. And Sproul himself plays unemployed Elmer, who was fired from his job as a clown. When a show involves alien puppets and gunfights, having a drawling former clown seems like overkill. But at least it’s still in the same satiric vein. Too often, the show turns serious and contemplative, when what we really want are more screams and goblin attacks.

The show is at its best when the family is huddled together in Glennie’s living room, anxiously waiting for the “goblins” to make themselves known. Aided immeasurably by Jeremy Mather’s sound design (seriously, this guy has some creepy tricks up his aural sleeve) and Anna Paniccia and Puppet Heap’s alien puppets, The Kentucky Goblin Siege sometimes reaches the heights of a good-bad horror movie, one in which you don’t particularly like any of the characters, but you can’t wait to see what the creatures will do next.

Sproul and Moore, though, keep ladling on emotional crises. Billy Ray and June have it out on the couch, goblins forgotten, and make peace with one another; Isabel and Elmer are such antagonistic opposites that we know even before their first bantering is completed that they’ll fall in love; and there are bizarre detours into simulated banjo plucking. What the show wants is more over-the-top moments, like chloroforming the high-strung Carol Ann every time she gets excited. Still, the rickety sets and deliberately bad acting can sometimes trick you into thinking you’re watching a particularly long, particularly good episode of Unsolved Mysteries. Or, better yet, an installment in one of those ’80s horror anthologies, like Freddy’s Nightmares. You don’t buy a moment of it, but it’s still fun to creep yourself out.

The Kentucky Goblin Siege, through Nov. 24, The [Kraine Theater], 85 E. 4th St. (betw. 2nd Ave. & Bowery), 212-868-4444; $18.