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
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