Nope. At least, not directly.
“I had jury duty,” Bernstine said the other afternoon in her dressing room at Lincoln Center Theater. “And I had postponed it so many times, because of plays, that I had to go.”
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. She plays the title role, a formidable woman based on a historical figure, adventuring 19th-century Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole. (The plural in the title hints at universality.)
It’s a mammoth part with monologues that stretch on and on, and Drury wrote it with her in mind. But on about day two of rehearsals, Bernstine looked at a calendar and panicked. There wasn’t going to be nearly enough time.
Spoiler: She figured it out, splendidly. Ben Brantley, in a glittering review in The New York Times, deemed her “fabulous,” “commanding” and “delightfully intimidating.”
In that first week of rehearsals, though, she found herself in tears every evening, walking the few blocks from the theater to CNN, where her husband, Rick Hall, is a cameraman who covers breaking news.
“I would go, and he would meet me in front of the building, and I would cry,” she said. “I would wake up in the morning: Cry. This has never happened before. I didn’t know how I was going to do this.”
That reaction was understandable, said her director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, given that Bernstine had to deliver five pages of monologue in one scene and seven in another.
“That’s enough to make anybody’s head trip,” Blain-Cruz said. “Even though she was terrified, that terror was so beautifully, privately contained. She didn’t allow it to contaminate the room.”
Bernstine calls “Marys Seacole” the most challenging thing she has ever worked on. It pushed her, she said, “almost to the brink of wanting to give up.”
“The jobs that are, I think, in the end most worth it are the ones that almost break you,” she continued with perfect calm. “That sounds horrible, doesn’t it,” she said. It wasn’t meant as a question.
This is the kind of career Bernstine has built, gravitating toward brainy work that challenges conventions and stretches forms — plays like Anne Washburn’s “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play” (she played Bart Simpson), Heidi Schreck’s “Grand Concourse” and Bess Wohl’s “Small Mouth Sounds.”
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 director Phylicia Rashad on a Stephen Adly Guirgis revival, she went unusually brassy in “Our Lady of 121st Street.”
Both Blain-Cruz and Drury pointed to Bernstine’s performance in Guillermo Calderón’s “Neva,” at the Public Theater in 2013, as a touchstone.
“She has this incredible monologue,” Drury said, “where she talks until she basically falls off the stage into the darkness, and I think about it all the time.”
By then, Bernstine had already worked on “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation ...,” Drury’s copiously titled play from 2012. Three years ago, when “Marys Seacole” was gearing up for its first workshop at Ars Nova, Drury begged her to be in it.
“If I can say, without sounding weird and self-aggrandizing, they’re both really complicated shows,” Drury said. “She, in both processes, has helped me understand how the play functions through the way that she is making sense of it.”
In “Marys Seacole,” that included helping Drury, who tends toward self-deprecation, to sympathize with her own title character. The real Mary Seacole was so enamored of her own exploits that she wrote a memoir about them, and the more Drury read about her, the more put off she was. Then Bernstine stepped in.
“Quincy was able to enjoy that character’s enjoyment of herself, and pride in herself, in a way that I felt let in on,” Drury said. Suddenly she could see Mary Seacole as “a badass,” and liked her for it.
This is, one suspects, part of the reason Bernstine is in such high demand. (Her single day off last week was her first in 36 days; she got a facial, then forced herself to laze around at home in Brooklyn.) When she’s not doing theater, there’s TV work lined up. Now in her third season as a recurring character on the Starz series “Power,” she recently booked a recurring role on “The Code,” a new CBS show that has yet to air.
What’s startling is how easily 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, 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!” Drury said.) And when the question of 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: Bernstine will turn 45 at the end of the month. In the interview, she had rounded up.
Hearing about this, both Drury and Blain-Cruz pealed with affectionate laughter.
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 Bernstine would have the starring role.
“Someone should do that, like, right now,” Drury said. “I want to see it so bad.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.