![]() Drury said.) And when the question of Ms. She insisted, firmly, that she is not the star of “Marys Seacole,” which she argued is purely an ensemble piece. Bernstine was subdued, polite and remarkably lacking in vanity. When she graduated in 1999, she headed straight for New York.Īs she chatted in her dressing room at Lincoln Center, Ms. Accepted to the University of California San Diego, she changed her trajectory. Then a professor, Lowry Marshall, urged her to audition for drama schools. ![]() This time she was smitten with acting, though she still had law school in her sights. ![]() Shaken and injured, she abandoned soccer to try something else - playing Grace in a production of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.” Then came the club soccer game when a ball smashed her in the face, broke her glasses and spun her life around. But mainly she was “a big jock” then, playing soccer and lacrosse.Īs an undergraduate at Brown University, she majored in public policy, planning to be a lawyer. 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. Growing up in Washington, the daughter of lawyers, she wasn’t a drama club kid. Bernstine might never have been an actor at all. She won her Obie in Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined,” and made her only Broadway appearance so far in Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room, or the vibrator play.” Last season, eager to work with the director Phylicia Rashad on a Stephen Adly Guirgis revival, she went unusually brassy in “Our Lady of 121st Street.” Burns, a Post-Electric Play” (she played Bart Simpson), Heidi Schreck’s “Grand Concourse” and Bess Wohl’s “Small Mouth Sounds.” Bernstine has built, gravitating toward brainy work that challenges conventions and stretches forms - plays like Anne Washburn’s “Mr. “That sounds horrible, doesn’t it,” she said. “The jobs that are, I think, in the end most worth it are the ones that almost break you,” she continued with perfect calm. It pushed her, she said, “almost to the brink of wanting to give up.” Bernstine calls “Marys Seacole” the most challenging thing she has ever worked on. There wasn’t going to be nearly enough time. ![]() Bernstine looked at a calendar and panicked. It’s a mammoth part with monologues that stretch on and on, and Ms. (The plural in the title hints at universality.) She plays the title role, a formidable woman based on a historical figure, the adventuring 19th-century Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole. So in January, she was fresh from her honeymoon when she went into rehearsals for Jackie Sibblies Drury’s fractured, time-jumping biographical epic “Marys Seacole,” at LCT3. “And I had postponed it so many times, because of plays, that I had to go.” Bernstine said the other afternoon in her dressing room at Lincoln Center Theater. One of the most valuable performers in some of the boldest new Off Broadway work, she can seem almost omnipresent on New York stages. The Obie Award-winning actress Quincy Tyler Bernstine got married last September on a rooftop in Brooklyn, but the honeymoon to St.
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