“How have you made division of yourself?” says Antonio, a character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. “An apple cleft in two is not more twin than these two creatures.”
That would be Heather Lind and Christina Bennett Lind (both FCLC ’05), who played twin siblings Sebastian and Viola in their eighth-grade production of the comedy.
No jest, though. Heather and Christina are twin sisters, and this past summer, they earned big roles on stage and screen. Heather performed in the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park productions of The Winter’s Tale and The Merchant of Venice. And Christina is playing Bianca Montgomery on ABC’s long-running daytime drama All My Children.
Heather earned her roles last spring, while completing her M.F.A. in acting at NYU, and began three months of intense rehearsals for the plays, which ran in repertory in June and July at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
“You start to think in iambic pentameter,” says Heather, who performed opposite Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice. “But I feel lucky to be consumed by it. You don’t get a chance to do Shakespeare that often, and to work here [at the Delacorte]has always been a huge dream.”
In Los Angeles, Christina made another kind of debut, as the daughter of Erica Kane, the character played by daytime legend Susan Lucci, MC ’68. New to L.A. and the realm of soap operas—“a whole alien universe of beautiful people”—Christina’s experiencing some of the fan frenzy that follows, mostly “tweets with bits of encouragement” or free advice, like “‘you should be meaner to David,’” a character on All My Children.
Raised in Guilderland, N.Y., the twins embraced the arts from early on. Their father is a painter and an educator at a museum and their mother is a ballet and nursery school teacher. Both sisters dreamed of being in New York and together chose to enroll in Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where they majored in theatre performance and studied abroad—Christina in Orvieto, Italy, and Heather at the London Dramatic Academy.
“There was never any fallback plan,” Christina says.
The two tight-knit sisters also share an amiable case of sibling rivalry.
“There’s always a sense of competition and mutual respect,” Heather says. “It’s been easier to cheer each other on when each person is having their own successes. We’re very lucky.”
– Rachel Buttner
