THEATRE

Trust can be bought by the highest bidder in The Fakus – A Noir, a head-spinning theatrical romp mingling money, passion and dreams. Centastage will debut this new play by Joe Byers, directed by Joe Antoun.

Set in Atlantic City circa 1957, richly stylized The Fakus – A Noir captures trust, betrayal and redemption and turns it on end through a triangle of calculating cohorts, a large sum of money and abrupt interactive visions of the Virgin Mary. Secrets present as spectacle, personalities clash, souls are exposed. “I’m intrigued with the way an audience gives its trust to a play,” says Byers. “Earning that trust is an experiment. Having some fun with it leads the audience to believe the unexpected, though situations may not turn out as they’d expect.”

Eccentric and elderly Mrs. Costello, an Irish Catholic mystic concocts a $100K scheme, striking up conversation with Leland and Harry, two wayward strangers who’ve become fast friends. A brokered deal binds the three for a week, leaving the men to share a hotel room sporting only one bed. Booze, cards and souls fuse together in a pressure cooker of unrealized secrets and dreams. Leland and Harry become entwined in each other, revealing their deepest skeletons, unexpectedly to another man. Clashing personalities and tousled souls blur betrayal and redemption, shaking convention to the core, spinning to a raucous, frantic finale.

Writer, director and actor Joe Byers has penned plays including Shakerman, winner of the Arch and Bruce Brown Playwriting Foundation Competition, TightAss: A Musical Bloodbath (based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus) featured in Theater Offensive’s Out on the Edge Festival and Pee Shy, a finalist for the Actors Theatre of Louisville Heideman Award.