At ACT, ‘North By Northwest’ Is an Insult to Hitchcock

I cannot tell you how much I hated North By Northwest, which opened this week at ACT in San Francisco. It is an insult to the source material of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film, and an insult to the audience’s intelligence. I ran from it as soon as I could, muttering obscenities to anyone within earshot.

This production’s first abomination is a shift in tone from a sophisticated, understated thriller to an over-the-top comedic farce, rife with insipid stereotypes and cheap gags. The second is the near-constant presence onstage of a narrator, who sucks the life out of any scene by overexplaining the action. The third is regular interruptions from songs by 1950s female pop vocalists like Peggy Lee and Betty Hutton, which turn into lip-synced dance numbers by whichever actor is unfortunate enough to be on stage.

The fourth is the production’s reliance on a surface-level 1950s nostalgia. The fifth is a finger-wagging for anyone who might problematically harbor any similar nostalgia. The sixth is the absurd plot coda and forced social commentary it tacks on at the end, in a sudden and jarring switch from slapstick to earnestness, with an entreaty to the audience that we “never again” return to the tactics of the Cold War, and have hope, or something.

You get the idea.

Adapted and directed by Emma Rice, this play is a complete misreading of Hitchcock’s original film, and its central theme of a mistaken identity that compounds upon itself. Roger Thornhill, who works in advertising, is misapprehended as a CIA operative and abducted by foreign agents. He soon finds that nobody trusts or believes him — not his captors, nor the police, the courts and even his own mother. In the film, this is illustrated by a disturbing scene with an elevator of strangers breaking into laughter at Thornhill’s notion that someone could be out to murder him. Onstage at ACT, the scene is played as a joke, the punchline of which is Ella Fitzgerald singing “Get Happy” over the P.A. and everyone breaking into a hip-wagging go-go dance party.

What is this play trying to do? Why does it turn Cary Grant’s distinguished Thornhill into an uber-chalant bro? Why does it expect we’ll think a man in women’s clothing is funny? Why do Thornhill (Danny Collins) and love interest Eve Kendall (Patrycja Kujawska), who in Ernest Lehman’s film script bounce beautifully around each other, have such little chemistry onstage? Why is the play obsessed with the phrase “global security,” mocking it repeatedly, as if staving off World War III was not a worthy goal? Why is a play set in 1959 using so many songs — Wayne Newton’s “Heart,” Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” an instrumental knockoff of Isaac Hayes’ “Shaft” — from the 1960s and ’70s? Why does it treat the plot like fluff but then have the narrator turn somber and wonder, out loud, “When will the killings stop?”

I have a guess for some of this, and that’s the successful nine-year run in London of The 39 Steps, a stage play adapted from the Hitchcock film that’s closest, thematically, to North By Northwest. Like this production, The 39 Steps utilized a small cast playing many characters, a sparse but modular set and quick pacing. But at least The 39 Steps, on stage, trusted the audience. This North By Northwest assumes the audience can’t follow the plot, so the narrator (Katy Owen) leads call-and-response sessions with us to remember who’s who.

It’s also focused on the wrong thing. The core of North By Northwest is one man’s quest for identity and trust after he’s been stripped of it. At ACT, it’s spies, both onstage and off. A prompt in the lobby asks patrons for their favorite conspiracy. Walking tours associated with the production visit various sites of “Cold War paranoia and espionage” near Union Square. This is its own form of mistaken identity. Even Hitchcock, speaking with François Truffaut, called the inclusion of government secrets in the film “my best MacGuffin, and by that I mean the emptiest, the most nonexistent, and the most absurd.”

As for the play’s awkward new ending, and retconning the sexism of the 1950s: why pick on North By Northwest? Why not undertake that with dim-witted pap like Kiss Me Stupid, or Under the Yum-Yum Tree? Or why not adapt a Hitchcock script with more complex gender dynamics to explore, like Marnie?

I feel compelled here to note some of the good. The set — a rack of suits, four revolving doors and a parade of suitcases — gets repurposed in interesting ways. The actors’ quick changes and choreography can be impressive. The famous crop duster and Mount Rushmore scenes have some inventive stage adaptation. Bryony Pennington (as Anna and others) is a standout, and an effervescent Owen as the narrator and Professor makes the best with what she’s given.

But these are crowded out by the rest of it all, which is just plain disrespectful to one of history’s best films. If, five years from now, we see a zany Gong Show-style staging of On the Waterfront with disco interludes, I’ll know which play to blame.

‘North By Northwest’ runs through Oct. 18 at the Toni Rembe Theater (415 Geary St.) in San Francisco. Tickets and more information here.