Helen Lawrence at Peter Jay Sharp Building

The setting: Vancouver, 1948. The scene: a slew of hardboiled bookies, crooked cops, and an enigmatic blond named Helen, all trying to tame the derelict city and their pasts by whatever boozy, pill-popping means. But typical noir this is not.

In a virtuosic feat of double vision from celebrated visual artist Stan Douglas (David Zwirner Gallery) and screenwriter Chris Haddock (CBC’s Da Vinci’s Inquest and HBO’s Boardwalk Empire), actors perform in front of blue screens as camera-controlled software inserts them into a meticulous landscape of seedy hotels and skid-row streets—projected as a completed film on stage. Banter crackles and a killer eludes in this two-toned world of sketchy politics and simmering racial tensions, raising the femme fatale and fedora to new technological heights.