Conrad Bain Likes Twist of Playing Diff’rent Folks in ‘Dining Room’

Conrad Bain, who played the wealthy Phil Drummond for eight seasons on the NBC comedy “Diff’rent Strokes,” has been mum so far about the personal tragedies that have befallen the show’s three young co-stars: Dana Plato, Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges.

And it’s something he still doesn’t want to discuss.

“It’s painful,” Bain says softly. “It is really painful. It leaves you with such a helpless feeling. I have been asked to go on all of these talk shows and I just think the continued public discussion . . . I can’t bear the thought. I love them.”

He is more than willing, though, to go on the record about his participation in the Pasadena Playhouse production of A.R. Gurney’s acclaimed “The Dining Room.” The comedy-drama allows Bain to really exercise his acting chops--he plays everything from a dying father to a senile old man to a 5-year-old child.

“Somebody said to me, ‘you were the father of those children on ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ and now you are playing the children,’ ” says Bain, who also is the father of three. “Everything is all switched around. I play a 5-year-old, a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old.”

Before being “discovered” 20 years ago by producer Norman Lear for the role of Dr. Arthur Harmon on “Maude,” Bain had toiled in the theater for two decades. He appeared in the original Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein’s musical, “Candide,” and Off Broadway in Jose Quintero’s landmark revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.”

“I thought ‘The Iceman Cometh’ was a total bomb,” Bain says. “We opened on a Tuesday and I told my wife we could make a date for Friday. I guess I was too close to the forest to see the trees.”

After “The Dining Room” closes Aug. 25, Bain is off to the Great White Way to co-star with George C. Scott in a revival of Paul Osborne’s 1938 fantasy “On Borrowed Time.”

“I sold out and went to TV,” Bain says. “Now I am buying my way back in the theater.”