Call this "young woman on the verge."

Or is she?

The initial evidence seems conclusive: Christine Ryndak is a beautiful young actress with talent and experience. What could hold her back?

		'When the World Was Green' Where: Quantum Theatre at the Mattress Factory Garden, 500 Sampsonia Way, North Side. When: Through Aug. 29; Wed.-Sun. 8 p.m. Tickets: $15-$25; 412-394-3353. Shepard and Chaikin, collaborative greats

The question answers itself. No career goes easily in the theater -- there's many a gap between aspiration and survival, goal and achievement. The competition is as intense as the working conditions are difficult and the opportunities limited.

And Ryndak finds herself now at the latest of many crossroads. Having just graduated from Point Park University as one of the top actors in her class, she has to choose which path to take -- to stay and work in demonstrably friendly but professionally limited Pittsburgh, to move to some larger theater city such as her native Chicago, to go to a prestigious graduate school and make the professional contacts that entails ... or to tackle the ultimate target, tumultuous New York.

This indecision echoes what Ryndak has felt before. "All my life I've struggled with the whole idea of theater as a profession," she says, mainly because no one in her family had ever done it. Maybe she doubted the seriousness of the work. As she describes the path she's taken, she keeps having revelations about the possibilities of theater.

In one college play, for example, "I felt in over my head, but for the first time I came to understand how important the process is." In another, "I think I understood that being an actor doesn't mean just one thing." She has kept testing theater, daring it to justify itself, or not.

Whatever her doubts, Ryndak already has demonstrated her considerable ability here in a dozen plays, half of them for professional companies beyond Point Park.

Now, as a sort of rite of passage between college and the crossroads, she assays perhaps her most demanding role, playing opposite veteran Bingo O'Malley ("a young spirit," she says) in Quantum Theatre's "When the World Was Green," a lyrical memory play by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin. Here, she says, shew has found what she loves, where "people are passionate" and the play "asks questions of both actors and audience."

Quantum is not new for Ryndak. She made her debut there last summer in the famous role of Hedwig, the martyred child in Ibsen's "The Wild Duck." And the larger City Theatre audience also has seen her -- a lot of her, since there was a brief nude scene -- as the girlfriend of a presidential candidate's son in Karl Gajdusek's "Fair Game," in spring of 2003. That earned her an Equity card and with it an introduction to professional productions. It also gave her experience in working on a new play with the playwright present. She got another kind of experience this spring, playing the tragic young heroine in "Hard Times" for the Playhouse Rep Company. That's the professional company staffed largely by her teachers at Point Park, which thereby ushered Ryndak out of tutelage into colleagueship with her former mentors.

Previously, Point Park provided plenty of learning opportunity in a half-dozen college shows. The most notable of these were Chekhov's "Three Sisters," where the then 20-year-old Ryndak played the womanly, dissatisfied Masha and showed she had left her acting girlhood behind. That was further proved by Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia," in which the faculty trusted her to play the mature scholar, Hannah.

On stage, she ranges far beyond her 22 actual years. But in an interview over ice tea at Bossa Nova, Ryndak seems pure teenager: T-shirt, worn jeans, freckles, start-ling blue-gray eyes and a dazzling smile that quickly relapses into spacey meditation.

Polish-German on her father's side, Irish-Hungarian on her mother's, Ryndak grew up in the Chicago area, moving from the South Side to a northern suburb in time for junior high (and in time to become a Cubs fan). Her mother, now a librarian, was then a teacher; her father is a data base administrator for a medical group.

There was no show business in her blood, although coincidentally her sister has just graduated from a college program in stage management at Boston College. That may not be just coincidental, since her sister is her twin -- although they are not identical twins, and Ryndak makes it clear they are very different.

Their parents took them and their one-year-older brother to shows; Ryndak and friends made up their own plays; and she went to a lot of movies. Out of such common experiences her interest grew, galvanized by a junior high teacher who created a student theater where everyone worked together and discovered the pleasures of community and commitment.

"It gave me something to do at an age other kids are lost," she says, referring to that teacher as the first of several important mentors.

Theater took a back seat in her conservative Catholic high school, which did little besides musicals. "You know, the money went to football" -- but she bears no grudge, because she got "a great education," emerging as class salutatorian. Along the way, she studied ballet, stopping only when she got to the point where they wanted six-days-a-week focus. And one high school summer she auditioned into a program at Steppenwolf, the famous company with which she had been "obsessed" (her word). There, she "gained a sense of ensemble theater," which to this day remains the criterion on which she evaluates theater work.

That brought her to a crossroads: Where to go to college? She originally figured she'd go to a big liberal arts school, like her friends, some of whom are now heading to be doctors. But she got interested in theater programs and, with her high grades, figured she'd have her pick.

Not so. "I got wait-listed everywhere." One disappointment was Carnegie Mellon, where she was accepted but not in theater.

It's sort of a mystery how she found Point Park. She didn't want to go there, but after a late audition and acceptance, there were limited options. So she arrived fully intending to transfer out after a year or two.

But she liked what she found, and Point Park returned the favor. The city grew on her, too, such that she's now quite "sentimental" (her word) about leaving.

Which brings her to that crossroads.

The experience of getting turned down by colleges was repeated this spring, when she was turned down by Yale. Of course, she was admitted to the equally selective American Repertory Theatre program at Harvard, but, perhaps naturally, "I think my heart was at Yale."

Her decision was further complicated when, at Point Park's New York showcase, she was one of the few grads to come away with an agent. She mentions that dismissively, but it's obviously important to her thinking. "I was encouraged by the things [her agent] is considering submitting me for."

And when she visited A.R.T., she realized that, with her Equity card and conservatory training, she already had some of what it offered. She was "hoping they'd convince me" to go there, but they didn't. Then, "I was afraid I'd really regret not going to grad school," but so far she hasn't.

So the path she's chosen is the toughest: New York.

"I need to go," she says. Then, more definitively, "I am going. I just wrote a very large check for a security deposit."

But maybe she'll be back. Before any of that, there's "When the World Was Green" to explore.