Alias Grace Margaret Atwood’s unimaginative, heavy-handed 1996 novel, which uses the lurid 1843 murder conviction of 16-year-old domestic servant Grace Marks to draw easy antipatriarchal moral lessons, gets an unimaginative, heavy-handed stage adaptation from playwright Jennifer Blackmer. But against tall odds director Karen Kessler and her stalwart cast imbue the staid, schematic proceedings with vibrant life in this Rivendell world premiere. Each actor in the story’s central triangle—Ashley Neal as the convicted murderer, Jane Baxter Miller as her none-too-enlightened jailer, Steve Haggard as the none-too-enlightened doctor tending to both women’s contradictory needs—brings an eye for nuanced detail (Miller’s inscrutable smile is impossibly layered), turning near stock characters into compelling conundrums. The rest of the cast isn’t far behind. Excepting the preposterous climax, these two hours are unexpectedly captivating. —Justin Hayford
The Funny Papers Plucky, smart-talking San Francisco Union Constitution Gazette reporter Alice Inkwell’s Pulitzer dreams go up in smoke when cut-throat tech magnate Heidi Techman buys the paper and installs a computer named STRONC to write all the copy. The resulting tabloid, touting meaningless headlines like “Have a Sandwich,” may become a cash cow. This topical satire from playwrights Stephen Winchell and Benjamin Vigeant renders the imminent demise of useful journalism discomfitingly silly, taking several delicious swipes at self-absorbed theater critics along the way (when the Gazette‘s critic gets fired, he needs a full production number and several bows before he can be on his way). Led by the authors, director Erica Reid’s gung-ho cast occasionally lack snap but never shy from making utter fools of themselves. —Justin Hayford
