The Later Stages : For SCR’s Founding Actors, ‘A Christmas Carol’ Is a Reunion

They consider themselves an extended family, not surprising given their history together. As founding members of South Coast Repertory’s acting company, they have more than two centuries of accumulated experience on stage.

Yet each of them--Richard Doyle, Don Took, Hal Landon Jr., Ron Boussom, Art Koustik and Martha McFarland--has managed, with varying degrees of success, not only to carve out a separate and unique artistic identity but to maintain a sense of group achievement.

Though several other professional resident theaters around the country have founding actors still working in their core companies--notably American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and Trinity Repertory in Providence, R.I.--none has SCR’s unbroken record of longevity or, for that matter, guarantees its founding actors as much work each season.

“This has been a 34-year commitment,” says Took, who roomed in college with SCR founding artistic director Martin Benson and joined the troupe for its first season in 1964. “It’s outlasted my marriage.”

Sentimental attachment to the company--echoed in separate interviews with each of SCR’s founding actors--becomes more acute this time of year because all of them customarily have roles in the theater’s annual “A Christmas Carol,” a tradition now in its 18th year on the SCR Mainstage.

Landon, who joined the company in 1967, sounds totally unlike the misanthropic Scrooge, a role he has played every year without fail.

“All the people I know best, whom I would consider my best friends, are in this group,” he says. “That sense of family has been real important to me.”

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Even Boussom, not in this year’s Christmas production because of “unavoidable personal commitments,” waxes sentimental. “I’ve spent two-thirds of my life with this group,” says the actor, at 51 the youngest in the troupe. “That’s a long, long time to be part of anything.”

To hear them tell it, in 30 years there hasn’t been a foul word among them important enough to mention. Any rumors of dissatisfaction are exaggerated, they say.

The notion that their roles have shrunk or that they are no longer central to the casting decisions of either Benson or David Emmes, SCR’s founding producing artistic director, is regarded as either cyclical, depending the season, or nothing worth getting upset about.

They say a decline in their importance is to be expected in a company that has grown from the back of a flatbed truck into a nonprofit corporate enterprise with an annual budget of $7.1 million, 70 full-time employees and 30 part-timers (not including actors, directors, designers and other production personnel hired on a show-by-show basis).

“As you get older, the roles change, and the perception of what you can and cannot do becomes clearer,” says Doyle, perhaps the troupe’s most versatile player. “I know when I was younger I used to get all ticked off because I thought that Don and Hal and Art and Ron were getting all the parts.”

Landon recalls, “There was a time when we played everything. You played the lead, then you played another lead, then another. But that was when David and Martin cast only from the company. We weren’t paid all that much. In fact, we weren’t even Equity, which is a lot different from today.” (Actors Equity is a professional union.)

Benson and Emmes can cast “just about anybody they want,” Landon adds. “So, sure, there are times when we play smaller roles. But as long as we still get a crack at one or two meaty roles every season, that’s what counts.”

Each of SCR’s founding actors is entitled to 26 weeks of work per season. They need not work that much, but they generally do--sometimes giving up potentially lucrative movie roles.

For example, Landon, Took and Boussom were cast in James Cameron’s “Titanic,” due out Dec. 19 from 20th Century Fox, but they withdrew because its overly long shooting schedule conflicted with rehearsal and production of last season’s “BAFO,” a play commissioned expressly for the founding actors.

“Maybe the most expensive film of all time,” Took says, “and Hal, as it turned out, had a major role.” Landon was cast as the multimillionaire John Jacob Astor IV, among the world’s richest men when the Titanic sank. “I guess the point is we’ve all made our sacrifices to work at SCR,” Took adds. “But the flip side is we have guaranteed work every year, and the movie industry ain’t never going to give us that.”

SCR’s growth alone does not account for the shift from a theater company that relied almost exclusively on founding artists to one that casts a much wider net.

Perhaps the single, most important change for the actors resulted from Benson and Emmes’ decision in the early 1980s to produce new plays as often as possible.

Instead of continuing to design seasons of standard repertory fare revolving around a core of actors, they chose to cultivate a playwrights’ theater. In fact, when SCR won a special Tony Award for regional theaters in 1988, the citation mentioned its contribution to developing new plays.

“I don’t know about the other guys,” Landon says, “but there was a year or two when I thought, ‘Hmmm. I’m not so sure I like this.’ Suddenly it was all about the plays, not about the actors. But I was merely being selfish. Very quickly, we all became fascinated with the process.”

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Doyle says he found working on world premieres more rewarding “simply from an artistic point of view. You get that first run at something. You get to influence the literature. Your ideas are incorporated into the text.

“I know that many things we created in the rehearsal process have been put into the plays and that actors doing the same plays now are out there somewhere trying to find those ‘moments’ that we originally created.”

Still, with success has come a certain distance, if not fatigue. As in many families, SCR’s founding actors have made their own lives. Closeness notwithstanding, they hardly see each other off the stage these days.

“In the early years, we hung out a lot,” Boussom says. “We were younger and wilder. So there was a lot of getting together and dreaming of the future, of putting the company together. We were riding headlong into virgin territory then.”

In 1966, when Boussom was 19, Emmes suggested he join the company.

“I was absolutely thrilled,” he recalls. “I got to sleep under the costume rack, and then I got to clean the theater. I couldn’t have been happier.”

And now?

“You get older. You grow up.”