Art attack Painted Alice uses broad strokes BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Combine high concept with low expectations — that’s the ticket! Playwright William Donnelly has come up with a facile examination of the plight of the artist that amuses as much as it fails to illuminate. Nevertheless, the Theatre Expansion pumps up the funny bits of Painted Alice (at the Carriage House through September 11) so the hot air of half-baked notions can lift our spirits for a while.

Pity poor Alice (Nicole Maynard), a blocked artist. We are as unclear as she is about the source of her creative constipation; she just can’t get any art out. Standing at her easel with a paintbrush in hand and a self-improvement tape blasting from a boom box, she can’t love herself unconditionally, as she’s being instructed, any more than she can like her next daub. Girlfriend Dinah (Beth Alianiello) just wants her to relax and come to bed and trust that things will loosen up in the morning.

Providing more pressure is Alice’s wealthy patron, Parker (Alexis Scott), who has already paid her to come up with the painting that she hasn’t been able to finish. Scott does the best work of the evening, in various roles, and no opportunity is juicier than balancing the internal contradictions of this self-satisfied passive-aggressive. "I wish you nothing but champagne and genius grants," declares the art collector in one breath while implying, through a smile, dire career consequences the next.

A talented, recently successful artist they knew has just committed suicide, Parker mentions. Darkly lightening the mood with an absurd image, the body is found in a laundry room dryer. Success, it appears to Alice, can be even less satisfying an option than failure.

Alice confides to Dinah that if she’s not getting paid she’s not an artist, "not in any real sense, anyway." The rabbit hole that Alice falls through in slow motion begins with her seeing Dinah at an art show in the company of an up-and-coming painter, continues with fantasizing them romantically cavorting on her blank canvas (via projector), and concludes cleverly as Alice finds herself peering through a tiny door on the floor of a museum, with the guard (Will Jamison) reprimanding her for playing with the art.

There is no white rabbit, since this isn’t a schematic parallel to Alice in Wonderland but rather an array of entertaining analogies. Maynard intelligently establishes a character who isn’t so much sorry for herself as honestly perplexed. In a museum gallery, Alice sees a drawing she did when she was a kid. After yelling at her for claiming to be the artist, the guard abruptly begins fawning in admiration. The misdrawn mermaid (Alianiello) is trundled out, snarky at her over placing a fin in the wrong place, but Alice has gotten a welcome taste of enthusiastic approbation.

Her next role models for failure come in a therapy group, in which one artist has proudly completed number 32 in a series of studies of a sore on his thigh and another simply wants whatever anyone else might get. Speaking of failure, a comically obese critic (Jamison) asks Alice why she would want to solve the problem of a miserable love life, since "that’s where the good stuff comes from." "Happy artists are dead artists," he continues. Going through her portfolio, he objects that the first work doesn’t make a statement, while the next two do so too overtly and too obtusely, respectively.

The playwright is resolutely checking off potential sources of artistic satisfaction and dissatisfaction, letting each cancel out its opposite. Alice encounters a talented 15th-century artist — a prior incarnation of hers — whose work and modest reputation didn’t survive. The conversation ends with the Renaissance genius lamenting that she hadn’t made room for nurturing relationships and family. But the other shoe drops with a successful young photorealist who moved out of the maddening city to the country to quietly raise a family; ostensibly content, he ends up screaming back at his offstage wife and desperately begs Alice to visit again.

The salon/party invitation he passes on to her gets Alice into a jet set crowd, but not before we enjoy a Tweedle Dee/Tweedle Dum (Scott and Alianiello) reminder of the social equivalence of artist as loser and artist as hack. The salon is called the Society of the Spirited Discussers, but Alice becomes quite dispirited at their superficial conversation, not to mention their incessant cell phone interruptions.

But we know all this — that commissions or an Andy Warhol wig does not an artist make, that a life itself should be a work of art. This production of Painted Alice, directed by Tim Rubel, can’t circumvent the false dichotomies sketched out by the playwright, but it can amuse us with the surreal journey.