MUKILTEO – The Lighthouse Players have come up with another comedy, this time an original work, to help raise money for the 2007 Mukilteo Lighthouse Festival.

The new show, “She Said … What?,” opens tonight at the Rose Hill Community Center and runs through Feb. 4.

Last July, the Lighthouse troupe performed the Neil Simon comedy “Rumors.” Many of the cast members have returned for this new show, written by Mukilteo resident Curt Shriner.

Returning cast member Terry Preshaw asked, in a nice way, that this time she not be cast as a ditz, the character she played in the Neil Simon production.

“I said, ‘no more ditzes,’ ” Preshaw said. “I find that whatever character I’m playing permeates my life.”

In real life, Preshaw is a lawyer. In “She Said … What?” she plays a divorce lawyer. Ironically, Preshaw once practiced divorce law until she switched to business immigration law, “happy law” as she called it, back in 1988.

Playing a ditz, Preshaw recalled, made it hard to be serious at her day job. But she said she finds acting liberating.

“I can assume any persona, explore all these interesting parameters and get to go to places I don’t normally go,” Preshaw said. “Like I normally don’t tell my husband to shut up.”

That’s how Preshaw’s new character, Rene Malone, the divorce lawyer, treats her husband in “She Said … .”

Malone is tough, does not have a soft approach to the world and is quick to anger. Preshaw described her as a Katharine Hepburn type, “kind of a bitch but endearing at the same time.”

There are nine characters in the play and they all fit together in this farce on the battle between the sexes.

“It’s funny,” Preshaw said. “When we first were starting our read, I honestly sometimes was laughing so much my cheeks were in agony.”

Shriner is witty and a “keen observer of the marital scene in America,” Preshaw said.

“Many of the situations presented in this show are stupid things that I either have done, read, said or heard someone say” Shriner states in a press release. “I have tried to take these funny life experiences and put them in a format that will be enjoyable to everyone, plus a twist at the end that should surprise everyone.”

Proceeds from the production will go to help fund the 42nd annual Mukilteo Lighthouse Festival, a three-day community event planned for the second weekend of September.

Arts writer Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424 or goffredo@heraldnet.com.

“She Said…What?”

Opens at 8 p.m. tonight at the Rose Hill Community Center, 304 Lincoln Ave., Mukilteo. Shows are 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 4. $10 adults; $8 seniors; $5 children under 12, at the door or 425-353-5516.