Every time Thomas McCurdy gets into a knife fight, he asks just one thing of his victims: Please die with feeling.

In fact, the Mililani actor would like them to expire with so much emotion that even people in the cheap seats of their community theaters are convinced they've just witnessed a murder.

Creating the illusion of violence is McCurdy's special gift. He can turn you into sushi with his phony knife and send you home without so much as a scratch or a Band-Aid.

During a recent class in stage combat, held at Diamond Head Theatre, McCurdy shared his skills with a handful of aspiring actors, teenagers and a pair of karate black belts and taught them how to create an audience of believers without producing felony charges in the process.

"It's like knowing a magic trick," he said. "It's sleight-of-hand and misdirection. They see one thing, but they don't see everything."

The first week, he taught them basic forms of unarmed fighting: Punches, kicks, slaps and shoves. The second week, they got dirty: Scratching, hair-pulling, knees to the stomach. The final class found everyone holding dull knives — black rubber daggers or chrome blades with fat, flat edges that would have trouble cutting toast.

"Some people just don't like the metal knives," McCurdy said, twirling a shiny blade with a black handle. "I like this because it looks good."

McCurdy is a tall, thin man without a trace of menace on his face until he offers up a Hannibal Lecter-like smile as he sweeps his shiny knife through the air. A 28-year-old former TV news producer — he's worked at KITV and KHNL — McCurdy is a graduate student in theater at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa. Six years ago, he took a summer class in stage combat called "Swords and Surf" and returned each summer since then to either take or teach the class.

The skills are useful in almost every production and help keep actors healthy.

"When you are on stage, you have adrenalin flowing, you're excited," he said. "If you are doing a punch incorrectly, it can go wrong very fast."

And he knows. Learning fake fighting wasn't funny.

"I've had occasions where I tagged people," he said. "I was kind of clumsy. I had been known to accidentally hit people. It took four years to get comfortable with it."

A lot of actors have trouble finding that comfort, McCurdy said. After trying to stab a wide-eyed Kathleen Munoz in the head, Leo Dalbert, a 17-year-old from Makaha, shrugged.

"You don't want to hit a girl," he said. "It takes a little to get over that."

Munoz agreed, even after Dalbert, who is a foot taller than her, insisted she throw a harder punch.

"It made me real nervous," said Munoz, a 42-year-old graphic artist from Wahiawa. "You don't know if you are going to actually hit him."

But McCurdy's class has no shortage of natural-born hams. When he told them to start slashing each other, he added, "Feel free to react if you want to." Then the room erupted in a chorus of dying actors.

"Ugh."

"Arg."

"Blech."

"Ohhh."

Judy Lemus, a 43-year-old black belt in karate who sports real bruises on her arms, even tried to knee her husband, Angel, in the back. The Kane'ohe couple has to work hard at pulling the punches McCurdy has taught them.

"In karate, the skill is in the control, and here he's making it look real, but it's totally fake," she said. "You have to act your way through that. That for us is the challenge. To make it look real when it's not real."

McCurdy calls that the sell. In the right light, it can make an audience gasp with every bloodless blow.

"Really, that's all it is," he said. "They see the flash and nothing else. That's why we like shiny knives. It sells to the back of the house."