Emma Rice’s decision to add a narrator to her stage adaption of North by Northwest leaves open the possibility that the entire production is meant to be understood as propaganda. 

This new narrator turns out to be a CIA operative, which means the whole production — and its geopolitical commentary on the relations between countries — could be nothing more than governmental propaganda to forward a CIA agenda. 

Which squares with Rice’s final change: a new ending reveals that Eva Marie Saint’s CIA-funded character uses the events of the movie to become a senator, further extending the narrator’s tentacles of influence into Congress. 

This conclusion suggests that all of North by Northwest is a CIA-puppeteered plot, a psyop intended to impart in us whatever we take away from the show. 

AND, given the indecipherable murkiness of any attempt to follow which spy is playing for which side and who’s two-timing whom — might she be a double agent for America’s enemies, even as a senator??   

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Greg Kotis revels in North by Northwest’s brand of unreliable narrator, when their personal connection to the tale that they’re telling us casts a fundamental doubt over the factuality (within the realm of the art’s fictional world). 

Is Urinetown an unbiased presentation of what actually happened in the town? Or should we distrust the narration of a literal agent of the state, who could be spinning a false yarn so that our takeaways prop up the hegemony of his state employers??

And The End of All Flesh — Kotis’ new musical — could be the characters painting a vision of the future based on conscious fabrication, in order to turn their matriarch into the founding mother of our next nation.