Diversity gets Rashmi Pilapitiya pumping

The Dominion Post Last updated 00:24 24/11/2009

Being stereotyped worries actors but, as Michael Field reports, a new play in Wellington stars a player who spreads herself across gender and age.

Talented Rashmi Pilapitiya cannot complain about the range of roles she plays.

There she was on Shortland Street, losing her virginity to a doctor.

Now, in Wellington at Bats Theatre, she is playing a transgender man working at a gas station to pay for a sex- change operation.

Pilapitiya's latest role is in GAS, described as a "darkly comic story of a petrol station set amongst the bright lights of Auckland's K Road".

Originally co-devised by emerging playwright Thomas Sainsbury, it explores the kind of characters who work at petrol stations.

"In our day-to-day lives, we never stop to think about the people we give our eftpos cards to to pay for the petrol. We are taking this and giving it a larger- than-life story," she says.

"If you look at the faces of the people at petrol station counters, a lot of them are new immigrants who may well have been doing something quite different in their homeland," Pilapitiya says.

"They are trying to work in entry- level jobs because that's all they can get; they're just trying to make a living." Pilapitiya says Sainsbury, who originally conceived GAS, wanted to know what would challenge her as an actor.

"I felt I had such a female, feminine shape; what if I had to play a guy, that would be a challenge," she says.

Now she's a turban-wearing Sikh.

"It's really hard. To make the audience believe him, I have to be so subtle and so simple; it's quite weird.

"My brothers came to the show and said, 'Oh my God, it's like the other brother we never had'."

The 32-year-old also found herself in a wide age range. First she was 20-year- old "Dipali Kumari" (sister of the now dead nurse Shanti Kumari) in Shortland Street.

Then in Khoj - the Search, by Auckland Indian theatre group Prayas, she found herself as an anxious Parsi mother in her 50s.

Pilapitiya, who co-produces GAS with Toby Leach and Yvette Parsons, admits to feeling the gender and age range is somewhat bizarre.

"It's part of the business, and if you are hungry enough as an actor, you take the work when it comes.

"When you get a chance to generate your own work with somebody else, you do it."

An Auckland resident, she prefers, like many actors, the live theatre of Wellington with its sophisticated audience.

They want to develop GAS and Wellington is the place to test it further.

"We want to be in a town where it is a lot easier to get a show on."

Although GAS is based on Auckland's K Road, Pilapitiya believes New Zealanders would recognise the setting and characters, because they are occurring everywhere as the country becomes more multicultural.

In GAS, Wellington-born New Zealand Cambodian Sarita So adds another Asian face. She was last seen in the International Comedy Festival with The Untouchables in The Not all India Radio Show.

Kate Prior plays Lillith, a devout Christian.

GAS is directed by Conrad Newport, whose previous credits include The Man That Lovelock Couldn't Beat and The Cape, which played at Circa Theatre.

GAS, Bats Theatre, Wellington, Tuesday until December 5.