What’s startling is how easily Ms. Bernstine might never have been an actor at all. Growing up in Washington, the daughter of lawyers, she wasn’t a drama club kid. In her quest to be well-rounded in high school, she did some winter one-acts at Georgetown Day School, where a fellow student, Leigh Silverman (“The Lifespan of a Fact”), directed her in a solo show. But mainly she was “a big jock” then, playing soccer and lacrosse.
As an undergraduate at Brown University, she majored in public policy, planning to be a lawyer. Then came the club soccer game when a ball smashed her in the face, broke her glasses and spun her life around. Shaken and injured, she abandoned soccer to try something else — playing Grace in a production of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.”
This time she was smitten with acting, though she still had law school in her sights. Then a professor, Lowry Marshall, urged her to audition for drama schools. Accepted to the University of California San Diego, she changed her trajectory. When she graduated in 1999, she headed straight for New York.
As she chatted in her dressing room at Lincoln Center, Ms. Bernstine was subdued, polite and remarkably lacking in vanity. She insisted, firmly, that she is not the star of “Marys Seacole,” which she argued is purely an ensemble piece. (“That’s so her!” Ms. Drury said.) And when the question of Ms. Bernstine’s age arose — often a delicate matter with actors — she answered without hesitation, saying that she was 45.
The next day, a publicist for the theater got in touch with a correction: Ms. Bernstine will turn 45 at the end of the month. In the interview, she had rounded up.
Hearing about this, both Ms. Drury and Ms. Blain-Cruz pealed with affectionate laughter.
Ms. Drury, as it happens, thinks of “Marys Seacole” as an ensemble piece, too, but one featuring what she called “a sneaky audition to get Quincy in a Broadway production of ‘Mother Courage.’”
By which she means, of course, that Ms. Bernstine would have the starring role.
“Someone should do that, like, right now,” Ms. Drury said. “I want to see it so bad.”
