Written by Chris Haddock. Conceived and directed by Stan Douglas. Coproduced by the Arts Club, Canadian Stage, the Banff Centre, Stan Douglas Inc., Festival TransAmériques, and Canada’s National Arts Centre. At the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on Wednesday, March 19. Continues until April 13

Helen Lawrence is empty. And we’re not talking so much about the existential void as about emotional and aesthetic hollowness.

Chris Haddock’s script—he created the story with director Stan Douglas—goes for a film-noir feel. It’s 1948, and when the well-tailored and mysterious Helen arrives in Vancouver from L.A., she has recently emerged from the psychiatric institution she was committed to shortly after her husband’s unsolved murder. Now she’s packing a gun and looking for Percy, who was her lover when her husband was killed. Percy works as a bookie in the old Hotel Vancouver. Along with crooked white cops and politicians, he’s launching into a shady business scheme that pits Buddy and Henry, two black brothers from the racially mixed Hogan’s Alley, against one another.

But none of this really matters. Haddock has written reams of fantastic period dialogue: when a shell-shocked soldier tries to pawn his belongings to Julie, the lesbian or possibly trans hotel desk clerk, she says, “No watches, neither. I got enough of those to keep Switzerland tickin’ for a year.” And a couple of scenes—including a gently erotic exchange between Julie and Helen—ride on emotional nuance. But the Hogan’s Alley conflict feels abstract, Helen is flatly enigmatic, and there’s precious little significant action.

For about the first 10 minutes of this 95-minute piece, the production’s aesthetic world is intriguing. On-stage, the actors perform in a blue box. Other actors videotape them and the resulting images are projected, as a black-and-white movie, onto a scrim, a taut, see-through surface that seals the front of the playing area. In the movie, the characters move through a virtual world, digital sets that have been created from archival photographs.

At first, this feels as cool as it sounds. Because the scrim is porous, you can see both the live actors behind it and the more fleshed-out artifice of the cinema on its surface: the notion that we’re constantly constructing realities becomes dizzyingly concrete. But once you’ve sucked on that experience for a bit, you’re left stranded in a space that fails to satisfy as either theatre or film.

Mostly what we get is a movie experience and by far the best part of that is the acting. There’s a delicate woundedness in Allan Louis’s Buddy that would be impossible to see in a stage performance. Crystal Balint brings languorous depth to Buddy’s girlfriend, Mary. Ava Markus is luminous as Eva, the shell-shocked soldier’s German war bride. And, playing Percy, Nicholas Lea gets just the right dark and dapper period feel.

There’s little sensual pleasure in the washed-out black-and-white imagery, though. John Gzowski’s score and sound design are generally too timid to add much tension or style. And while the technical accomplishment of creating the virtual reality is huge, the resulting film is weirdly underpopulated: only live actors inhabit it, so the total population of this Vancouver is 12.

For brief moments—usually at times of emotional shock—the film disappears and we’re thrust into the concreteness of the actors’ bodies on the blue stage. These holidays in physicality never last long enough, though. In the theatre, the sustained separation from the players feels like oxygen deprivation. Tear the Curtain, which the Arts Club coproduced with Electric Company Theatre in 2010, blended the physicality of live performance with the fluidity of film. Helen Lawrence, on the other hand, suffocates the theatre with cinema.

Helen Lawrence is a huge experiment. Was it worth making? Absolutely. Does it succeed? No.