THEATER : Actress Lands Role, Confidence at SCR : Stage: 26-year-old has won raves since her debut at South Coast Repertory. Now she’s ready to return to New York. : BYJAN HERMAN

Devon Raymond is currently playing Belle in “A Christmas Carol” at South Coast Repertory, but for nearly two years before she came to Orange County, she couldn’t land a stage role. Whether she went to open casting calls or agent-arranged auditions, the results were always the same: variations on a theme of rejection. That she was talented, well-trained and attractive didn’t seem to matter.

Of course, she was trying to crack the toughest market: New York. But nobody ever told her getting a job in the theater would be easy. Quite the opposite. With a father in television--he used to produce “The Jackie Gleason Show”--and with other members of her family “in the business,” as she put it, Raymond had had more than fair warning.

Still, she couldn’t help being shaken. “The hardest thing was not that you wouldn’t get a part,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It was realizing that you wouldn’t even get anybody interested in considering you.”

Four years at the Juilliard School Drama Division--she graduated in 1987--had left her unprepared for both the intensity of the competition and the psychic toll of continual rejection.

“The constant ‘No, we don’t want you’ wears you down,” Raymond said. “It’s hard to reconcile that with your own feelings of self-worth. You get knocked around a lot wherever you go, but somehow it’s really difficult in New York.”

So she came to California last year for “a new perspective,” which she achieved almost immediately by landing a TV role, as the girlfriend of Dabney Coleman’s son on “The Slap Maxwell Story.” The perspective was brief and peculiar: “I got to play a whole scene with a party hat on my head.”

Shortly after that ice-breaker, she discovered SCR--or rather, it discovered her. Within the past 10 months Raymond has played two major roles and has been cast in a third at the Tony-winning theater. The 26-year-old actress made her professional stage debut last March in Charles Dickens’ “Hard Times” on the SCR Second Stage. And when the Mainstage production of “A Christmas Carol” closes Dec. 24, she will begin rehearsals for Sally Nemeth’s “Holy Days,” which is to receive its U.S. premiere on the Second Stage next month.

“We think she’s extraordinarily talented,” said SCR artistic director Martin Benson, who cast Raymond as one of the four leads in the Nemeth play. “After her tremendous debut here last season, we thought, ‘This is somebody we want to work with again.’ She’s one of the most natural, dedicated actresses we’ve come across in some time.”

For her part, Raymond believes that SCR is “one in a million.” It has given her more than just a series of jobs. It has, she said, “revived that real joy I have for theater,” which was in danger of being lost.

Ironically, her striking success at SCR has not persuaded Raymond to remain in Southern California. Instead, it has restored her ambition to make a stage career in New York.

When Benson offered “Holy Days” without so much as an audition, Raymond had already given up her West Hollywood apartment and planned to return to New York at the end of the “Christmas Carol” run. The upcoming role will only delay her departure.

“I want to go where there’s an abundance of theater,” said Raymond, a New York native who spent her childhood in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and her adolescence in Pacific Palisades. “There’s just more theater on the East Coast than there is here. And I guess I prefer the New York life style. It gives me a certain motivation.”

Will she burn any bridges at SCR? Not to hear Benson tell it.

“Actors go back and forth between the coasts all the time,” he said. “If she leaves, it doesn’t mean we can’t lure her back with a tantalizing role. I would bet you anything you’ll see her again at this theater.”

Meanwhile, SCR casting director Martha McFarland can’t seem to get enough of her either. She was so eager to spread the word on Raymond that she had the actress read last week for British director Paul Marcus, who was in town casting the Mainstage production of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (to begin previews in February).

“I know I can’t do that show because it overlaps with ‘Holy Days,’ ” Raymond said. “But it was worth reading for him just to listen to his ideas.”

Will she really go back to New York?

Raymond considered the question with intent brown eyes that bear an uncanny resemblance to Diane Keaton’s.

“As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be an actress,” she said. “The truth of the matter is, it could be another year before anything here came up again for me.”

In other words, the answer was yes.

“A Christmas Carol” continues through Dec. 24 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tuesdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. with matinees today, Thursday and Saturday at 2:30 p.m. and Sunday at noon and 4 p.m. Tickets $20-$22, less for children younger than 12. (714) 957-4033.