Spirits of Christmases past

Alex Coolman

The ghosts of Christmas plays past are coming back to haunt South Coast

Repertory. The playhouse is putting on its 20th annual production of

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” and this year, there’s a twist that

Ebenezer Scrooge could easily appreciate.

Actors from productions of years gone by will congregateat the theater

Wednesday night for a reunion, bringing with them a bit of playhouse

history and a lesson about the difficulty of making art pay in the

Scrooge-ish environment of the real world.

About 50 players, from shows as far back as 1986, plan to attend the

reunion performance. Some, like Juliane Caillouette, who appeared in the

1996 production of “Carol” and played in this fall’s “Wind of a Thousand

Tales,” are still cracking away at the business of acting.

Several others have moved away from the theater since they originally

went through the motions of Dickens’ work.

Newport Beach resident Jeffrey Wilson, 24, who played the young version

of Scrooge in the 1986 version of “Carol,” has gone on from his youthful

ambitions of working on the stage to the more modest reality of handling

marketing work for Santa Ana-based technology company Ingram Micro.

Wilson said he was fairly enthusiastic about acting when he was younger.

“I went on to do a couple more things [after ‘Carol’],” he said. “I did

it all through high school and in the beginning of college.”

At some point, though, the realities of day-to-day economics -- what

Dickens called the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching,

covetous” world of old Scrooge -- began to put pressure on Wilson to make

some intelligent career choices.

“I noticed that if you’re going to be an actor, you have to be fully

devoted to it,” Wilson said. “And only a few people can make a living at

it.”

But if Wilson didn’t find his true calling on the SCR stage, he

nevertheless found the experience valuable.

“It prepared me to have fun. It instilled confidence, because you had to

stand there in front of 600 people. ... So it’s a bit nerve-racking.”

Paul Root, also a veteran of the 1986 performance, said he moved away

from acting almost immediately after finishing the show. But Root, who

now works as a salesman for Lanier Worldwide in Santa Ana (a company that

does “document management,” Root said), said the experience of being on

stage has been professionally useful to him.

“It teaches you how to fit in somewhere that you’re not necessarily

accustomed to,” the Newport Beach resident said. “In sales, you kind of

need to be like the people you’re around. There’s so many different kinds

of persons out there that you really need to be able to act like other

people.”

Unlike Scrooge, whom Dickens described as “secret, and self-contained,

and solitary as an oyster,” a successful salesman needs to be interested

in the habits and tastes of other people, Root said.

“What I think may be funny or what I’m interested in is not necessarily

what other people are interested in. I need to figure out what they’re

interested in to get them to talk or buy or whatever,” he said.

It’s the reality for many of the former “Carol,” players. They may be not

doing Dickens anymore, but they still need to know how to act.

‘A Christmas Carol’

WHERE: South Coast Repertory, 644 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

WHEN: Playing through Dec. 26; call for show times and dates

HOW MUCH: $17 to $39

PHONE: (714) 708-5555