NILES — Josh Crank likes a challenge.

“Red Herring,” which opens Friday for a three-weekend run at Trumbull New Theatre, provides one.

Crank was asked to direct the Michael Hollinger play after the original director dropped out.

“This show has 24 scene changes in it,” he said. “It’s almost written more like a screenplay than a stage play. Instead of being in one location for 20 or 30 pages, we have one location for five or six pages. It’s a big technical challenge. That’s very attractive about doing this piece.”

Doing a show like that in a theater with a no fly system to lower scrims from above or wings to bring things set pieces in from the sides of the stage increases the level of difficulty.

“The first thing is we went through and saw what were the spaces that were the most recurring or had the most plot relevance,” Crank said. “What we came up with were four zones on the stage. There’s the pier, there’s two bedrooms and there’s a neutral zone in the middle of the stage as we bring set pieces on and off.

“The transition is almost like a dance. You have to be very fluid, very smooth. It can’t be a scene ends, this pause and then the next group of actors come on. It has to be very fluid. As one group of people is leaving, the next one’s got to be coming on.”

“Red Herring” is set in 1952 at a time when the U.S. is developing the H-bomb, war hero Dwight Eisenhower is running for President and Sen. Joseph McCarthy is trying to find Communists in America.

In Hollinger’s script, McCarthy’s daughter has just gotten engaged to a Soviet spy. Meanwhile, a female detective tries to find out who dumped a dead body in the Boston Harbor in time for her honeymoon in Havana. It’s described as “a noir comedy about marriage and other explosive devices.”

“It’s not a parody, it’s a noir comedy, which you don’t really see that much,” Crank said. “And I think our audience really likes the noir style the play is in.”

To capture the mood of those old black & white movies, Crank showed the cast some examples of the genre.

“We did ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ ‘Casablanca’ and (Alfred) Hitchcock’s ‘Notorious,'” Crank said. “The acting styles in ‘Casablanca’ really stood out. ‘The Maltese Falcon’ is just a tentpole in the genre. And for ‘Notorious,’ the last third of that movie is just absolutely Hitchcock at its best. I know it’s not one of his more famous pieces and the first two thirds of that movie are kind of standard for what you expect for the era, but that last third, once all the pieces are in place, really just takes off like a rocket.”

The cast features Allison Bye, Chase Miles, Casey Murphy, Cher Halas, Steve Halas, Marc Bye John Brien, Molly Cravalho and Caitlyn McKenna with most of the actors playing multiple characters.

The script calls for a cast of six, three men and three women, but Crank decided to expand it some.

“We wanted to lighten the load on our actors,” he said. “One gentleman, he’s playing four parts. Everyone else is playing three parts or less. Especially for volunteer theater, this is supposed to be fun. We don’t want to bury them with so much memorization that they can’t actually enjoy the experience, right? It becomes more of a chore. So I chopped up and divided the roles differently than the original cast, the original directors and casting directors did it.”

If you go …

WHAT: “Red Herring”

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday through Jan. 25 and 3 p.m. Jan. 19 and 26

WHERE: Trumbull New Theatre, 5883 Youngstown-Warren Road, Niles

HOW MUCH: Tickets are $17 for adults and $15 for students and are available online at trumbullnewtheatre.tix.com and by calling the TNT box office at 330-652-1103.