Role Models for an L.A.-Run Theatre Center : Stage: If the city takes over the Spring Street complex, it might get some good ideas on how to build an audience from one successful regional theater.

Some people are lucky, some touched by the stars.

Then there’s Adolfo (Al) Nodal, the city’s cultural affairs department general manager who may find himself heavily in cultural affairs of a different order if the city gets into show business by assuming control over the often-troubled Los Angeles Theatre Center.

If the City Council accepts the idea of a muncipally run theater, Nodal would help the people at the Theatre Center run the Spring Street complex after the Community Redevelopment Agency buys the property and the council comes up with an annual subsidy estimated to run from $150,000 to $2 million.

With all of that as a possibility, Nodal might best be advised to get out of town.

But not for the usual reasons.

Obviously Nodal will have to head east to see how the culture paragons of New York and Indianapolis run their versions of nonprofit theater. But Nodal might also be persuaded to head in a different direction: north to Oregon.

First stop should be Ashland, Ore., close to the California border. Then maybe a stopover in Portland. Both cities, the rural and the urban, have successful theater projects. And both are run by the same organization, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

There is nothing wrong in starting with a winner if you’re looking for a role model.

The Theatre Center has the potential to become a winner. It has developed a reputation as an experimenter, a prodder of theatrical frontiers, an often nettlesome challenger.

In its prodding and its experimenting the Theatre Center has failed to attract enough ticket buyers to completely settle the fiscal realities of our free-market theater.

So far.

Yet, the troubling and constant irony that has surrounded the theater that Theatre Center Artistic Director Bill Bushnell built is that all of its troubles have taken place in a city that likes to brag about its being the show business capital of the universe and its multicultural population a model for the nation in the country’s most populous state.

If the city does in fact take over the five-theater operation it has a chance to put some substance into its frequent Chamber of Commerce-like bragging: the once and future city could have a once and future, successful theater that truly fulfills all the bragging about the city’s place as an entertainment capital.

So some traveling music is in order for Al Nodal.

In his travels, Nodal would find that there are obvious and disturbing differences between the Theatre Center and the longer running Shakespeare Festival.

But there are also some surprising similarities:

* Both are in remote areas. The festival in the Rogue Valley is miles from a freeway or an airport, the Theatre Center is on the shores of Skid Row.

* Both are dependent on the automobile.

* Both were started by strong, imaginative, dedicated, ambitious leaders.

* Both started as single theaters and evolved into multiple-stage complexes.

* Both attempt community reach-out programs, the Theatre Center with its ambitious multicultural programs, the festival with its year-round programs for schools throughout the West.

* Neither was an immediate success.

But we can’t forget the nagging differences between the two:

* The Oregon operation has been growing for 55 years; the Los Angeles operation has been on Spring Street for only five years after its previous run on Oxford Street in East Hollywood.

* Oregon is a vacation; Spring Street isn’t. And that is the toughest issue in equating the festival with the Theatre Center.

The Oregon theater, however, has had its share of social challenges. When it was started in 1935 by Angus Bowmer, the Oregon theater wasn’t exactly what a predominantly rural population felt belonged in the neighborhood. Some people thought money spent on theater was far from appropriate. The war years hurt attendance, the Beats of the ‘50s and the flower children of ‘60s brought with them different social problems. But besides being a place where dramas are staged, the Oregon theater always believed it could do something for its community.

What the festival has done is bring in about $60 million a year annually to the Ashland area. It operates an eight-month season in the south and a five-month season currently in Portland, where this week the West Coast premiere of “M. Butterfly” closes. It has a $10-million budget and gets 75% of its budget back in earned income: ticket sales, gift shop sales, royalties. In terms of ticket sales, it has become the largest and probably the most successful not-for-profit professional theater in the United States, luring 400,000 people annually to areas that probably few of those 400,000 would have ever visited.

What people like William Patton, the festival’s executive director, might tell any visitor to Ashland is this: It takes time and patience to build a theater. It takes time and patience for a theater to find an audience and to generate collateral benefits.

To some extent that was the pitch Bushnell of the Theatre Center made to downtown’s leaders of commerce and culture: The theater might help attract a new wave of people and wealth into an area generally regarded as a backwater.

Some of Shakespeare may have been as foreign to Ashland and its visitors as some of Bushnell’s earlier frontier efforts were to Los Angeles theatergoers. That’s why the Oregon festival built slowly. The governing philosophy in Ashland has been to develop carefully, to develop nothing new until there was a strong need. Theaters were added when audiences grew. The expansion into Portland took several years of planning and has paid off. The “roofing” of Ashland’s outdoor theater in time for next year’s productions also took years of planning and development.

Those are the lessons downtown Los Angeles might learn from downtown Ashland: patience, time and careful development.

The Theatre Center grew quickly once the land and the resources and the Community Redevelopment Agency and Bushnell got together. Early on there were expressions of great ambition: a restaurant in the theater, a bookstore, a library, cultural programs of all sorts, poetry readings, musical offerings, new life for the center of the city, nightly and daily stage programs, workshops of all sorts.

Patience, time and careful development.

For some people at the Theatre Center, the past five years in the so-called fast lanes of Los Angeles have been a lifetime.

In other remote areas, five years were just a beginning.