The 2024-25 season at ACT kicked off Wednesday night with the opening of Private Lives, Noel Coward's beloved 1930 comedy about the impossibilities and intransigencies of romantic love.

It's a play that has been performed numerous times in San Francisco and across the globe in the last century — and as this production's program points out, it made for a 1972 hit in the early days of ACT itself, with a young Francis Ford Coppola directing, all while he was flying back and forth to Los Angeles to edit The Godfather.

A classic four-hander (four-person cast), Private Lives centers on divorced couple Elyot and Amanda, originally played by Coward himself with his longtime collaborator Gertrude Lawrence, as they run into each other on their respective honeymoons with new spouses, at a seaside hotel. The original was set in Deauville, France, on the Normandy coast, with the second and third act set in Amanda's flat in Paris. And in this production, director KJ Sanchez has transposed the world of the play to 1930s Argentina — the coastal town of Mar Del Plata — and the apartment is in Montevideo, Uruguay.

"I chose Argentina because at that time, there were so many similarities to when Coward was writing," Sanchez says. "At that time, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. But they were about to have their own major economic crisis and lose everything. So, there was this sense at that time of desperate gaiety... We fear that there's something absolutely terrifying around the corner, but let's laugh at it. Let's be gay and let's pretend like none of it is happening."

The politics of the day, or the looming threat of Nazi Germany, is really nowhere to be found in the text of the play. It is a light comedy whose central delight is in the repartee of Coward and Lawrence — who no doubt honed and revised the witty dialogue together in rehearsal. And everything else, including any real analysis of their compatibility or their respective personality disorders, is left undiscussed.

Amanda, played confidently here Sarita Ocón, announces in the opening scene to her new husband Victor (Brady Morales-Woolery) that she's "unreliable," and probably always will be. Elyot (Hugo E. Carbajal), explains his own foibles to his new, younger wife Sibyl (Gianna DiGregorio Rivera). And on adjoining balconies, Elyot and Amanda soon see each other, plot quick escapes to avoid one another, and then come together and admit they still love each other and end up dumping their new spouses and running off together, back to Montevideo.

Coward's comedy, seen as daring in its day, explores the gender politics and mores of the wealthy and worldly, with Amanda often in control both intellectually and sexually. She and Elyot have a volatile bond that may be doomed, or just doomed to repeat itself endlessly, but if they could only survive on snappy patter, cigarettes, and brandy alone, they'd be better off.

Things come to a comedic head, of course, when Sibyl and Victor join forces and track down their spouses to confront them, making for this efficient play's third act, and I won't spoil things any further.

Sanchez's direction, while bringing out the marvelous physical comedy talents of both Ocón and Carbajal, unfortunately leans too much into the rising volume of Elyot and Amanda's fights, and not enough on Coward's tit-for-tat banter and rhythm. And at times, the repetition of South American place names feels more like a distraction than anything else.

Tango dancing, which Sanchez said was part of her inspiration for the production's setting, ends up playing a minor role in just a couple of scenes, and also feels more like a shoehorned contrivance than a vital component of the action.

Other aspects of the production, including the music and sound design by Jake Rodriguez, work well in creating a mood. The terrific set design by Tanya Orellana, particularly the Beaux Arts-meets-Deco grandeur of Amanda's apartment, is also transporting and beautiful to look at.

Private Lives feels like a piece that is of its time and place, Europe of the 1920s/30s, particularly when it gets to discussing taboos around divorce. When the main characters sit down to discuss this, they even bring up the idea that they were never really divorced in the eyes of the Catholic church — once married, always married, except, they admit, they aren't Catholic. Were they actually Argentinian or Uruguayan in the 1930s, though, these characters would almost certainly have been Catholic and this swapping of partners would have been a bigger deal, socially, so that's another flaw in the transposition that stands out, if we were to nitpick.

Setting aside such quibbles, the play still has plenty of humor and cleverness to make it feel modern, even if it doesn't have much to say, definitively, about what makes love succeed or fail.

'Private Lives' plays through October 6. Find tickets here.