Having survived more than three years falsely imprisoned in China on espionage charges, it's hard to imagine journalist Cheng Lei as a teenager in Australia, too scared to try out for her high school theatre production."I was a nerd, I was fugly. My friends and I called ourselves the underdogs, " she recalls."We were a motley crew and I was too scared, too chicken shit, to go to that audition."The Chinese-born television journalist is now starring in her own theatre production at Arts House in Melbourne called 1154 Days.It's based on her gruelling experience in detention and named for the…