STAGE : Murderers Row : The actors in ‘Mass Murder’ give voice to the minds of such serial killers as Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and the Night Stalker

“A lot of what drives an actor is what drives a murderer.”

As director Karen Goodman says this, she doesn’t appear to be offering up some glib quotable quote. Rather, she is simply providing the motivational link between such notorious killers as Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer and the actors who portray them in “Mass Murder.”

Goodman’s actor-developed work, the first produced by the World Theatre (which shares a newly remodeled space with Theatre Igloo), presents a gallery of 15 contemporary mass murderers and serial killers speaking their lethally distorted and complex minds. But the critical difference between this and a scripted play on the subject is that Goodman demands that the actors find the killers’ voices--in essence, act as co-author with her and dramaturge Dave Klane.

As actor Michael Childers, playing British serial killer Des Nilsen, terms it, “I have to become a vessel for him to speak.” For Childers and the rest of the ensemble, the 10 weeks preparing “Mass Murder” has been an act of simultaneously researching, burrowing into the dark side of the self and making flesh today’s most potent symbols of the Grim Reaper.

At the same time, they’re distinctly aware of the ways in which “Mass Murder” can be sensationalized into a spectacle glamorizing among the worst specimens of the human race. Roger Gutierrez, who plays Richard (the Night Stalker) Ramirez, notes that “crime enforcement officials really don’t ike it when a show like this is done, because they assume it’s just going to pump up the public profile of these killers. I can really understand the police officer who said to me how everyone knows who Ramirez is, but nobody knows the names of his victims.”

Childers, though, suggests that some of the horror mass murderers elicit stems from “the fact that they’re human, that they’re much more than the simple monsters that people assume them to be. Because they are predators, they know who victims are.”

Serial killing continues to produce the kind of combined reaction of revulsion and fascination that naturally sells newspapers and generates movies (“The Silence of the Lambs,” “Drowning by Numbers,” “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”), countless TV docudramas, and even musicals and operas (Steven Sondheim’s “Assassins,” John Moran’s “The Family”). Figures like Manson and Bundy, like it or not, are 20th-Century celebrity companions to the 19th Century’s Jack the Ripper.

“Each era spawns creatures which embody the fears of the period,” says author Harold Schechter, currently writing his third true-crime book on H.H. Holmes, the first U.S. serial killer. “In the 1930s, with dark forces spreading across Europe, a spate of horror films came along. Today’s killers embody a host of middle-class anxieties. The mass murderer is the savage force roaming in the dark, as the nuclear family huddles terrified inside the home.

“The reason that it seems as if we’re having so much mass murder and serial killing going on,” Schechter adds, “isn’t due to a conspiracy of psychopaths. When we stare into the faces of these killers, we’re looking at some horrifying potential in all of us.”

While Goodman is asking the audience to come face-to-face with the middle class’s worst nightmare, she’s also daring her actors to, as she puts it, “get under the skin of these murderers and ask themselves, ‘What keeps me from killing people?’ ”

Which brings us back to the murderer-actor connection. Des Nilsen--who was convicted of six murders that took place between 1978-1983--made himself up to appear dead, and would prop his dead victim alongside him for his own private Grand Guignol show. The Zodiac Killer--the only one in the play still unapprehended--once dressed in an executioner’s costume for a killing. David (Son of Sam) Berkowitz, starving for attention and recognition, searched for his name in the newspapers after killing his latest victim.

What Goodman has found since she began developing “Mass Murder” in 1986, when she was artistic director of Prop Theatre in Chicago (where the play was first produced), is that all these killers grew up as abused children. “They searched for a means, like all of us, to express themselves. Now why some abused kids never kill and some do . . . well, we can’t really know. What is clear is that they don’t know their own ailment, that they’re the bloody legacy of abuse they’re unaware of.”

Goodman, who says she has tried to stay away from Los Angeles as long as possible--she was raised in Canoga Park--preferred learning theater in the real world rather than the academic one of San Diego’s Mesa College. Even before this, though, she knew that directing was her mission: “My inspiration was the outdoor theater at Pompeii, which I saw when I was 16. Seeing this ancient place, covered in flowers, gave me stage pictures.”

She bypassed New York for Chicago, famous for its healthy mix of institutional and experimental theaters, where she landed at the Goodman Theatre (no relation). “It was Stuart Gordon, who was doing his adaptation of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ there just before he went off to film ‘Re-Animator,’ who urged me to start my own theater.”

The Prop gained a rebellious, even naughty reputation, staging plays by William S. Burroughs and erotic works by Anais Nin and Goodman that stressed a sensual nakedness paralleling the emotional nakedness of “Mass Murder.” But it was not until Goodman returned to her hometown earlier this year that she finally met Dan Piburn, who had helped run the Igloo’s Chicago operation while Goodman was at the Prop. Piburn, who plays Henry Lee Lucas in the play, joined with Goodman, T. Baker Rowell (“Mass Murder” composer and sound and light designer), Kristin Coppola and T-Grey Parker (Charles Manson) to found the World, while the Igloo is now under Milton Justice’s direction.

What Goodman fashioned for “Mass Murder” in Chicago isn’t being repeated for Los Angeles; even Childers, the only carry-over actor from the Prop, says his Nilsen performance is changing considerably. Since she has no intention of ever publishing the play--”This material is geared to these actors at this time, and it will always change depending on what actors are involved”--Goodman finds herself, even six years after the original idea, discovering a new play based on her actors’ own discoveries.

Actor Gene Triplett, for example, came across reports from Atlanta that his character-subject Wayne Williams, convicted of two of the 27 slayings of young Atlanta African-Americans, may have his conviction overturned if previously undisclosed evidence is granted a judicial hearing. Triplett: “A police informant tape-recorded a confession from a Ku Klux Klan member claiming that he had been involved in 20 of the 27 murders. When rehearsals began, I thought that Williams may have killed. But after my research, I’m convinced that he was railroaded.” (A ruling that may permit a retrial of Williams is pending.)

As much as this new information altered Triplett’s and Goodman’s approach to Williams--no longer “mass murderer,” but “the wrong man”--it hasn’t changed Goodman’s bleak but hard-to-dispute conclusion about the mass-murder phenomenon.

“The pattern is not changing: As human life becomes more disposable, mass murder and serial killing increases. Police know that there are hundreds, thousands of these killers out there. The victims of abuse in the first five years of life can create their own victims later, and there’s nothing I see turning that around.”

“Mass Murder” runs at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays at the World Theatre, 6543 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 960-5596. Through June 14. Tickets $15.