Among the cast, she jokingly refers to herself as the Wicked Witch of the West, but with the striking name of Nike, you could call her Goddess of Shoes.

The reality is more prosaic. Her name is Nike Doukas, with Nike pronounced just plain Nicky. But she does come from the West, Los Angeles, where she makes an active career at the leading theaters as well as on the screen (IMDB lists 32 credits).

As far as "wicked" goes, Doukas is here to play Mrs. Cheveley, the femme-almost-fatale who serves as the villain in Oscar Wilde's comedy of marriage and politics, "An Ideal Husband." Directed by Andrew Paul, it opens for previews tonight at Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre.

"I predate the shoes," she laughs as we discuss her name. "I used to see my name misspelled Mike," before the shoe brand came along and made it recognizable, if easier to mispronounce.

Doukas didn't know about PICT, but she's here because actor David Whalen, who once played Freddie to her Eliza Doolittle at South Coast Rep, suggested her to director Paul. When she arrived, she discovered her former teacher and frequent colleague Dakin Matthews was already here playing King Lear.

"That was a total coincidence," she says, one in a string of several. Her first professional job was working for Matthews at the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival; she's a member of his company, Antaeus; "I even babysat his children." Another coincidence was finding former colleague Erika Rolfsrud starring at the Public Theater in "Rabbit Hole."

Mainly, it's the role. "I felt it was so good, and I trusted David." She's been happy with the acting community she's found here. "You know it's good when you're looking at the butlers and thinking, 'They're good!' " For the record, those butlers are being played by E. Bruce Hill and Dek Ingraham. Playing the other leads with her and Whalen are Paul Todaro and Beth Hylton.

Doukas calls "Ideal Husband" the first professional play she's done on the East Coast -- and if anything proves her a Westerner, it's thinking Pittsburgh is East Coast. "I didn't realize Pennsylvania was so big!"

She grew up in Lexington, Mass., and caught the acting bug early. "I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be an actor." Her mother was a talented amateur artist and both parents were active theatergoers, so she and her three sisters valued the arts.

"But not as a profession!," Doukas laughs. So when she headed half-west to the University of Wisconsin, she was going to double-major in theater and psychology -- until she discovered the statistic courses were offered at night, in conflict with theater.

After a brief taste of New York City, she moved to San Francisco and the three-year MFA program at the American Conservatory Theatre (the company that was born at the Pittsburgh Playhouse). Then she went to "leagues," the New York auditions, which got her an agent, and although everyone told her to stay in New York, she moved to Los Angeles.

"New York didn't seem as glamorous, because I'd been there already," she says. In contrast to some Easterners, she loves Los Angeles. Her second day there she was cast in a movie of the week, along with Matthews, who'd been one of her teachers at ACT. She did mainly TV for a while, because her agent didn't want her doing theater, and then she lost that agent ("hard on my ego," it's a complicated story) and found one who supported her theater habit.

"I've had an amazing theater career with amazing actors in roles I never would have had anywhere else," she says. To the prejudice against Los Angeles as a theater town because it's so dominated by film and TV, she says, "Ridiculous! There's just as much good and awful theater there as anywhere."

Although more of her work has been in the classics, often English ("I have a good British accent"), she's worked personally with such prize-winning contemporary playwrights as Richard Greenberg, Beth Henley, Howard Korder, David Margulies and Amy Freed.

"I've stood on a stage with a symphony orchestra and done Shakespeare." She played Beatrice opposite Douglas Sills' Benedict in "Much Ado About Nothing" at South Coast Rep, the same play in which she played "the oldest living Hero" with Richard Easton at San Diego's Old Globe.

She works often with Matthews' company, Antaeus, which practices the double and triple casting common in Los Angeles. This allows actors to drop out for a night to do a national commercial that will pay the rent, or for two weeks to do a movie that will help put their child through college

She calls "Ideal Husband" a great play that isn't often done. (She missed the very successful Peter Hall production in London and New York in the '90s, and we never talked about the 1999 movie.) She calls it "topical, well constructed, a blend of sophisticated satirical comedy and deep drama" -- and some melodrama, too.

"The portrait of the marriage is authentic and moving," she says, with "startling, frank and thought-provoking" talk. "There's no real villain -- except me!"

She defends Mrs. Cheveley as a woman with guts who, though mean, never lies. She's "a blackmailer, but she's sexy and funny and in ways even admirable. Women don't get to play many villains; it's fun. You get to do what men do. She is a siren, but in a male world she's incredibly smart and powerful."

Sounds like a role you might travel 3,000 miles to play.