Six costume changes are just the start of the challenges in Play Me Deadly, writes Rebecca Blithe.
Sitting in the corner of an almost deserted cafe, Liesha Ward-Knox is approached by an elderly man wearing a turquoise T-shirt stretched taut over his protruding stomach. "Are you a movie star?" he asks her. Miss Ward-Knox politely tells him "No", and later politely declines his offer to take her out for a drink.
Not a movie star, but a good guess. Miss Ward-Knox has graced stage and screen for the past decade, as optimistic airhead Jemima Hampton on Shortland Street and the polarising, but critically acclaimed role of Una, in Blackbird, starring with Michael Hurst.
Her latest role, in Tom Sainsbury's Play Me Deadly, has her morph into six characters - a male police officer, an elderly European woman with what she says is a really bad European accent and, perhaps the piece de resistance, the macabre 1950s bombshell, Vampira, television's first horror host complete with pallour, black hair and dress, and an impossibly tiny waist.
The play, set in Hollywood's golden era and written by American Louis Mendiola, follows the detective Richard Marlowe on a bizarre crime trail investigating the death of a forgotten film star. He crosses paths with outlandish characters - monsters, aliens and fading movie stars.
While the characters are different to others Miss Ward-Knox has played, the era of their origin is familiar to her.
" My dad's really into those old B-grade horror films. Our cat was called Bela, after Bela Lugosi. So these characters aren't foreign to me, I know where they fit. I love that era, it was so full of kitsch and repression and a lot of tension."
At face value the play could be assumed a grim tale, but Miss Ward-Knox says in many respects it's quite the opposite. "Despite its subject matter, it's light, sometimes very silly. But it is about society's outcasts, the freaks."
The entire set is built from cardboard, perhaps an homage to 50s horror director Ed Wood. Given the undesirable title of worst movie maker ever, Wood's films were notorious for sets falling down. Set walls were often seen to shake when actors brushed against them.
Miss Ward-Knox says the potential for things going askew should add to the play's comical air, and is part of what she loves about theatre.
"The thing about theatre is it's such a living breathing art form. Anything can happen.
"One night I was doing a show and there was a baby doll and its head fell off. There were about 400 people in the audience. When the actress went to pick the baby's head up, she kicked it. It was a serious play, we were all watching on the monitor thinking, we can't go on."
When The Aucklander caught up with Miss Ward-Knox last week she was musing the logistics of her six costume changes, how she might create the villainous arch of Vampira's eyebrows with masking tape and was still on the lookout for a full body leotard, "Like a catsuit".
What: Play Me Deadly, directed by Tom Sainsbury, written by Louis Mendiola, starring Liesha Ward-Knox, Sam Bunkall, Roberto Nascimento,
When: 7pm, March 1 - 4.
Where: Basement Theatre, Lower Greys Avenue, Auckland CBD
How much: $20
Tickets available from: www.iticketexpress.co.nz