The spy at the heart of “Red Herring” likes to fish for red herring.

The detectives in “Red Herring” prefer to angle for Communist spies.

And in the McCarthy era comedy/murder mystery by contemporary playwright Michael Hollinger, most everyone employs the show’s titular tactic: distract attention from the real issue.

Which means nothing – and no one – is what it seems.

“You know how we tend to romanticize the ’50s? Life was so simple and there were no problems and girls didn’t get pregnant and there was no sex?” says Jeanne Chinn, who’s directing the production that opens tonight at the Lawrence Community Theatre. “(Hollinger) is just kind of blowing a hole in that theory – which I think is good – in a very light-hearted way.

Marion Constantinescu, standing, Jane Henry, seated left, and Dean Bevan star in Lawrence Community Theatre's production of Red

“It’s very much like the Renaissance era, when everybody pretended they were gold and good, and then they went running to each other’s bedrooms all the time. Everybody (in this play) seems to be above board on the outside, but nobody really is.”

The time is 1952. American scientists are developing the hydrogen bomb, and Dwight D. Eisenhower is on the campaign trail. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s daughter just got engaged to a Soviet spy, and Boston detective Maggie Pelletier has to find out who dumped the dead guy in the harbor – or miss out on a honeymoon in Havana.

Kansas University doctoral student Uta Walter plays the leading lady, a hard-boiled PI on a mission.

“This is set in the ’50s, so Maggie is, in that regard, an unusual woman being in the police force,” Walter says. “She has essentially two passions in life. One is her work, being in the homicide division. And the other passion is her husband, Frank, who is an FBI agent.”

Walter has played minor roles in Lawrence Community Theatre musicals, but this is her first leading turn and her first straight play. She’s enjoying the show’s rapid clip – 24 scenes in just over two hours – and says one of her biggest challenges is not cracking up at all the funny business unfurling around her.

“My character really is the most straightforward one, sort of the least comedic,” Walter says. “Everybody else gets to be pretty wacky around her, but my character sort of walks a straight line, more or less.”

For Forrest Lowry, the challenges are different. The Ottawa attorney and Lawrence Community Theatre veteran plays six different characters in the show – and almost every one has a different accent.

There’s the Irish priest, the English physicist, the Bostonian bartender and the Southern coroner who loves cutting up bodies.

“I’ve done accents for years,” Lowry says. “I don’t have any problems with accents as long as I give myself enough time to practice.”

Cast members of Red

He’s perfected his King’s English by watching so much British television through the years. His Irish, which he finds a little more challenging, has been honed with help from a dialect tape given to him during a stint in the Irish show “Playboy of the Western World” at the Ottawa community theater. And he crafted his Southern drawl by mimicking the speech characteristics of a North Carolinian friend and borrowing from a recent role as Boolie in “Driving Miss Daisy.”

In response to reviews of the play complaining that scene changes took too long, director Chinn decided to eliminate any intricate furniture and use simple boxes to represent tables and chairs.

“I’ve got a crack crew that’s getting the scene changes down in 15 seconds or less,” she says.

Also maintaining the flow of the 24-scene play will be recorded 1950s crime jazz and slides of McCarthy and other famous faces of the era.

“The really neat thing about it is that it’s not only about the ’50s and McCarthy and spies and all of that fun stuff,” Chinn says, “but it’s also about love and how everybody, no matter what the time or era, manages to find each other.”