"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.