A Family That Plays Together ...

Like Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Stu and Joyce Eriksen have a special credential for playing couples who, for richer or poorer, through closeness and disenchantment, are in it for the long haul. They have been married 46 years.

Cronyn and Tandy often starred opposite each other on stage and screen through 52 years of marriage, ending with Tandy’s death at 85 in 1994. The Eriksens--he is 70, she is 69--are actors by avocation, serious amateurs known only on the grass-roots scene of small Orange County theaters.

The Vanguard Theatre Ensemble in Fullerton, where they are company members, tries to book at least one play each season featuring them as a couple. “A lot of [us] look at them and say, ‘Wow, I hope I have it that together when I’m [their age],”’ said artistic director Wade Williamson.

These days, the Eriksens are together in “Foxfire,” a 1980-vintage play that was custom-built for Cronyn and Tandy. The script is drawn from a series of oral history narratives about life in the Georgia mountains. Cronyn, with help from novelist Susan Cooper, wrote “Foxfire” with plum parts in mind for himself and Tandy. The Eriksens saw the Cronyns play in “Foxfire” at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in 1985, but at that point they were not yet immersed in the local theater scene.

Neither had acted up through the first 25 years of their marriage. They met in 1954 at the University of San Francisco, where Joyce was a nursing student and Stu was finishing his doctoral degree in pharmaceutical chemistry.

In 1965 they settled in their spacious house in an unincorporated neighborhood between Santa Ana and Tustin. In 1981, following the lead of the youngest of their three daughters, Joyce went out for a part in “Fiddler on the Roof” at First Presbyterian Church in Santa Ana.

Her epiphany about theater came on a silent stage the day after the production closed. “Everything was gone, all that emotion and all that exuberance and all that exciting stuff that was there before. It was ethereal in a way.” She decided that she wanted to rekindle those evanescent qualities again and again.

By the late 1980s, she was working her way seriously through the acting conservatory at South Coast Repertory. Stu, who had been an executive for a pharmaceutical company, was too busy to join her onstage because he was working toward a second Ph.D. in management. That was OK with Joyce.

“Acting was going to be my piece of cake. I really didn’t want his encroachment.”

That changed after Stu got his first little bite, taking a tiny role nobody else wanted in a play Joyce was cast in at the Garden Grove Playhouse. In 1991 they auditioned together for roles at the Laguna Playhouse, then the flagship of Orange County’s amateur theater scene (it has since gone professional). They played a small-town Hoosier couple in “The Diviners.” Thespian togetherness was fun, they found, and soon Stu was joining Joyce for acting courses.

In 1993, he was cast at the Vanguard as Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons,” a heroic part full of moral authority. Joyce played More’s wife.

“It scared the pants off me,” Stu recalled. He told Joyce he couldn’t believe he got the role with so little acting experience. The Times’ Jan Herman praised Stu’s “low-key austerity” as Sir Thomas.

Williamson, the Vanguard artistic director, says the Eriksens’ strong commitment to behind-the-scenes tasks has been crucial to the theater. Overheard griping about the posters and program design for “A Man for All Seasons,” Stu was in short order installed--in the spirit of “Oh yeah? See if you can do better”--in his ongoing post as the Vanguard’s head of graphics and publicity.

Williamson says the couple regularly contribute sweat equity by helping build sets. At times when money has been tight, the Eriksens have contributed cash.

“I don’t think the company would be here today if we didn’t have them with us,” Williamson said.

They have not always played a couple when cast in the same play; nor do they always go out for parts in the same shows. Stu anchored a production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” at the Vanguard last year by playing the cantankerous eccentric Captain Shotover; Joyce had a small part as a maid.

Joyce, on her own, starred in the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s “‘Night, Mother” in 1999. Reviewing that show in The Times, T.H. McCulloh said her “bountiful energy and delicate shadings of character paint an empathetic portrait that lingers in the memory.”

But the Eriksens have done their share of notable husband-wife duets, including the Henry Fonda-Katharine Hepburn tandem in “On Golden Pond.” “There is a deeply ingrained familiarity between the two, like a special chemical bond,” Times reviewer Robert Koehler said of the Eriksens’ performance in that 1995 production at the Newport Theatre Arts Center. They also have raided more than once the cupboard of partnered roles originated by Cronyn and Tandy, playing opposite each other in “The Gin Game” and “The Four Poster.”

In “Foxfire,” the Eriksens say, their own life experience, rather than the onstage example of the illustrious Cronyn and Tandy, has been most important in creating the roles of Annie and Hector Nations. In the play, Hector is five years dead but remains the most real presence in Annie’s life; she converses with him, and flashback scenes fill in their past. Hector is no old man with a twinkle; we learn that his harsh, unyielding ways have chased away two of their children for good; the third, a country singer, fears for Annie’s safety alone on the mountainside and urges her to move on with her life by joining him and his children in Florida.

The Eriksens say the same issues have played out in their own lives. Stu persuaded his mother, now 92, to move from San Francisco to Orange County several years ago; one of their daughters is after them to settle near her in Virginia. And they have seen all three of their girls go through divorces, something that they, like the Nations, never considered an option.

Another close-to-home scene is the one in which Annie ministers to Hector’s laid-out corpse, setting coins upon his eyes in a pre-burial ritual.

“That really tugs at me,” Joyce says, knowing that “whether it’s me first or [Stu] first, that time will come.”

“I’m lying there and it tugs at me,” chimes in Stu (a conversation with the Eriksens involves a lot of chiming in).

But while she uses her family relationships to guide her in the role, Joyce says, she makes sure not to let those emotions override the composure needed to do her job onstage. “You pull from reality, but you don’t dwell on the reality.”

The Eriksens are due to play a comically at-odds couple next spring in “Best of Friends” at the Vanguard; Stu says the Newport Theatre Arts Center also has asked whether they would like to play the tragic husband and wife at the heart of next spring’s Orange County premiere of Horton Foote’s 1995 Pulitzer-winning drama, “The Young Man From Atlanta.”

Both continue to work part time--Joyce as a health consultant for the Fountain Valley School District, where she worked for 20 years as a nurse, and Stu teaching courses at USC and UC Irvine. Stu confesses a twinge of regret that his theatrical life began at 60 rather than, say, 16.

“I’m sorry I’m not 25--not because I want to be 25, but because there are so many roles to play. It would have been neat to have done it longer.

“I keep telling Joyce that we’ve got to keep doing as many parts as we can,” he says with a laugh. “Because pretty soon we won’t be able to remember the lines.”

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“Foxfire,” Vanguard Theatre Ensemble, 699A State College Blvd., Fullerton. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., $13-$15. (714) 526-8007. https://www.vte.org.