According to Lincoln Center's new LCT3 project at its slogan, it takes "New Audiences for New Artists." It also takes new critics, hence the establishment of Theater Talk's New Theater Corps in 2005, a way for up-and-coming theater writers and eager new theatergoers to get exposure to the ever-growing theater scene in New York City. Writers for the New Theater Corps are given the opportunity to immerse themselves in the off-off and off-Broadway theater scene, learning and giving back high-quality reviews at the same time. Driven by a passion and love of the arts, the New Theater Corps aims to identify, support, and grow the arts community, one show and one person at a time.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Fringe/The Alice Complex

Photo/Nelson Hancock

Reviewed by Aaron Riccio

Peter Barr Nickowitz's The Alice Complex suffers from only one thing: it's a little too complex for the modest little story he's crammed into an hour. It hardly matters, as Bill Oliver's expert direction and the perfect performances of Lisa Banes and Xanthe Elbrick make this one of the slickest productions of the entire Fringe Festival '08. Here's an example of the abundant cleverness: Elbrick plays Quinn, an actress who is about to star in her theater professor Margo's new play, which is about a young girl named Rebecca (Elbrick) who, in order to work out her love/hate relationship with her idealized feminist teacher, Sally (Banes), takes her hostage. Along the way, Elbrick plays a younger version of Sally, and Banes plays an older versino of Rebecca, touching on a lot of nuances and shades, but forgoing the need to stress anything deeper in these relationships for surfacey lines ("I hate beginnings," says Quinn; "That's because you haven't seen enough endings," replies Margo) and melodramatic mania (as when Rebecca pretends to go off the deep end, hoping to wake up the Sally she is in love with). It's a brilliant showcase, though, and if the overall story winds up a little muddied, the individual choices and chemistry between these two women are terrific.

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