Longtime L.A. Theater Director Has New Role, Scene Change to Campus : Stage: Bill Bushnell will debut as a director at Cal State Long Beach with his adaptation of ‘The Doctor and the Devils.’

A man who cast a long shadow over Los Angeles theater for years makes his directing debut Friday at Cal State Long Beach.

Bill Bushnell, former artistic director of Los Angeles Theatre Center, begins a new phase of his career with his adaptation and staging of Dylan Thomas’ screenplay, “The Doctor and the Devils.”

It will rotate with director Joanne Gordon’s version of “Dylan,” Sidney Michaels’ biographical drama about the Welsh poet.

When the financial roof fell in on Bushnell’s theater a year ago, the first question was, “What will be done with the center?” The second was, “What will happen to Bill Bushnell?”

It was hard to imagine Los Angeles theater without Bushnell. He took over as artistic director of the Hollywood-based Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre in the mid-1970s from founder and “Waltons” star Ralph Waite, and later transformed it into the sprawling four-theater LATC downtown.

He lured veteran American and European stage artists (Alan Mandell and Timian Alsaker), attracted nationally regarded playwrights (Thomas Babe and Eduardo Machado), nurtured new voices (playwright Marlene Meyer and director David Schweizer) and remembered neglected communities (especially Latinos and African-Americans).

But LATC was a victim of the recession and of the grandiose dream of the theater’s primary supporter, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, to revitalize crime-ridden Spring Street. By fall, 1991, it was clear that without an influx of about $32 million from the city, Bushnell’s company could not survive.

On Oct. 13, 1991, the doors closed.

Since then, the building has been used mostly for workshops and performances by the Bilingual Foundation for the Arts and two LATC offshoots, the Raven Group and Latino Theatre Lab. The building’s operator, the L.A. Cultural Affairs Department, has yet to complete a plan for regular programming.

And Bushnell?

He is happily busy in Long Beach.

He directs California Repertory Company, the campus-based professional acting company, and is a professor, teaching scene studies to student actors this semester.

He works under Howard Burman, head of the Cal State Long Beach Theatre Arts Department and artistic director of California Repertory Company.

“I love not being responsible for the whole ball of wax,” the burly, bearded Bushnell said. “I don’t have to spend time raising, say, $150,000 to cover next week’s payroll. The big adjustment is that I have my weekends free.”

He has used much of the time since February updating “The Doctor and the Devils,” which is set in 1827 Edinburgh, Scotland, into a contemporary study of science run amok.

The play is modeled on the grisly tale of anatomy professor Dr. Robert Knox, who employed killers to provide his class with fresh corpses. Bushnell’s version also cites recent similar crimes, such as the use of murdered corpses by the Free University Hospital medical school in Barranquilla, Colombia.

Bushnell consulted a welter of versions of the story. Author Donald Taylor wrote a play on which Thomas based his script--which was never filmed but was published in 1954. Later, British writer Ronald Harwood wrote a screen version that was filmed in 1985.

Harwood’s script was “very clean , very wrapped up,” Bushnell said, “but I wanted a messier version, because it’s about very bloody business.” So Bushnell went back to the Taylor version, eliminated much of the narration and brought it up to the present.

“The actors address the audience, who are asked to contemplate the moral responsibilities of science,” Bushnell said.

Bushnell said the play’s academic setting is fitting to a production on a campus and suggested that the most viable professional theater of the future may be at a college.

“It could be that the kind of expensive operation we had at LATC is a dinosaur,” he said, “and that . . . a training conservatory and theater for the professional actor, working in tandem with students--is what has to be done.”

Bushnell is helping spearhead the Theater Department’s pilot program, “After School,” which will send Cal Rep pros to Abraham Lincoln School in Long Beach to teach children everything from acting to design.

“We’re frankly trying to get to them before the gangs do, and we want to keep it going for enough years so we can track the kids and document how the arts are essential to education,” he said.

“The key is getting sustained funding,” he added.

So, in a sense, the fund-raiser of Spring Street has not really stopped asking for money for art. He has just moved closer to the ocean.