A spooky theater is her usual haunt

The title character of “The Woman in Black” appears for only a few quick moments of the thriller at the Road Theatre in North Hollywood. Although she’s often swathed in murky light, you can tell immediately that she’s up to no good.

She’s so scary that you might look at the program, only to discover that no actress and not even a character name is listed in what looks like a two-man cast. No actress emerges from the wings for a curtain call. No woman’s glossy photo is posted out front. Could she be ... a real ghost?

Not to worry. The actress who plays her most of the time called from her day job to talk about playing what she referred to as the WIB.

“It’s fun to be anonymous,” she said, still refusing to reveal her own name, for the sake of the illusion. “When else do you get a title role without any lines, just to have fun? It’s like Halloween every night. One night I got booed -- it was so cool.”

She and her occasional alternates try to conceal their identities even from other members of the Road Theatre. However, she acknowledged that their names are in the program after all: They are listed as part of the crew for the show and do, in fact, perform other backstage duties.

A few of her Road Theatre friends have found her “looking pale, with red-rimmed eyes” after the show and have asked her if she is the Woman in Black. She denies it.

However, she told her husband the truth. He brought his parents to see her, leading to the inevitable jokes, she said: “So, my son married a witch.”

-- Don Shirley