The actress Miriam Silverman came out of the womb to an audience.

In the late 1970s, Silverman’s mother, who was pregnant with her first child at 35, was asked to participate in a televised special on pregnancies among older women. The birth was broadcast live on “Good Morning America,” and little Miriam arrived in the world on air.

“I think there’s something too obvious about it,” Silverman said in a recent interview at a light-filled cafe in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. “I never sort of made it out to be like, ‘Yes, I was born for this!’ But I’m appreciating my coming-out party now.”

Silverman, 45, is one of the stars of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” the Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 play about navel-gazing liberalism, which also features Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan as the central married couple, Sidney and Iris. Even with the cast’s Hollywood wattage, Silverman’s portrayal of Mavis, the prim, bigoted Upper Manhattan matron and older sister to Iris, shines through, earning her a Tony Award nomination for best featured actress in a play.

Directed by Anne Kauffman, the show, which scored a nomination for best play revival, is a polemic against puffy-chested, lefty bohemians — mostly men — and their delusions of intellectual grandeur. Hansberry’s Mavis, a racist snob and antisemite complete with coifed curls and a hoity-toity hat, stands out in sharp contrast. Her barbs spare no one, yet without the hypocrisy swirling around other characters, Mavis’s lack of self-consciousness comes to look more like self-awareness.

“The kind of gorgeousness of the character is that she is happy for the most part, or finds happiness in the life she has chosen, made and continues to stick in,” Silverman said. “And yet she is also aware that there might have been some other paths.”

Silverman drew praise for her performance at the show’s nearly sold-out run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February before its Broadway transfer. In a review of the BAM production, the New York Times theater critic Jesse Green wrote that she “steals every scene she’s in.” And the critic Laura Collins-Hughes, in her review of the show on Broadway, declared Mavis “the best role in the show, and the best played.”

Oscar Isaac, whose Sidney often spars with Mavis, called Silverman’s performance “a masterpiece in plain sight.” As his character is forced to reassess his smugness, their dynamic starts to level and the two emerge as peers.

“Every time she comes onstage I feel like I can breathe,” he said. “Let her put a spell over the whole audience and I can just sit and watch.”

Isaac recalled an experience one evening of “utter alienation” as he sat next to Silverman onstage. He felt as if he had been pulled out of the orchestra seats as an observer, and momentarily wondered if he’d be able to remember his lines.

“I feel like I am a lucky member of the audience,” he said. “She’s so good she makes me break character.”

Silverman, who grew up on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, was a studious kid, or “annoyingly precocious” in her words, consumed by hobbies and extracurriculars: In addition to acting and singing (she played Rizzo in “Grease” in middle school), she took ballet, played the piano and became a serious soccer player.

It wasn’t until she went to college at Brown and performed in Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” that she began to study acting, enrolling in all of the classes she could. After graduation, she stayed in Providence, R.I., pursuing a master’s degree in fine arts and acting in regional theater productions; some weeks she’d rehearse “Annie” by day and perform in “Electra” by night. (Alongside stage acting, Silverman has also had small parts in TV shows like “Blue Bloods,” “The Black List,” “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”)

“I’ve always felt like there were so many different paths that I could have taken, or maybe still could take,” Silverman said. “But to me that’s related to what I love about acting, which is an endless curiosity for different things.”

A dream part came in 2006, when Silverman landed the role of Hennie in Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing!” at the Arena Stage in Washington, which she called a “Top 10 role” and credits with setting her career in motion. During the production, she started dating a fellow cast member, Adam Green, who is now her husband.

Since then, she has played many headstrong women who men don’t take seriously, at their own peril: the firebrand political organizer in Joe Gilford’s “Finks”; the deceived wife in Ayad Akhtar’s “Junk” on Broadway; the accomplished, emasculating artist in Will Arbery’s “Plano.”

Embodying those complexities is part of what drew Silverman to “Brustein.” She calls Mavis, who she first played in a 2016 production at the Goodman Theater in Chicago (also directed by Kauffman), “the perfect part.”

“It’s much more interesting to me than just playing a likable ingénue that, you know, everybody immediately can sort of get on board with,” she said. “I’m always more drawn to complicated, tricky, flawed characters. And not trying to make them likable, per se, but just trying to be inside of them in all of their humanity.”

For the New York run of “Brustein,” Kauffman knew she had to bring Silverman back.

“She puts her head down and she does the work and she’s consistent as hell,” Kauffman said. “She’ll read your mind and give you what you need and more. She’s a workhorse who is finally getting what she deserves.”

In addition to performing eight shows a week on Broadway and raising her two children, Silverman teaches undergraduate and M.F.A. acting students at N.Y.U. She was watching the Tony nominations livestream on a laptop with her husband before class when she heard her name announced.

“It sort of felt like I went to another planet for a while,” she said, calling the nomination — her first — “the most thrilling and delicious little prize. It was really emotional in all the good ways.”

Kauffman called the layers to Silverman’s performance a “bedrock of vision.”

“She’s unafraid of embracing the darkness of this character,” Kauffman said. “She looks to how to grow and incorporate an angle of her character, embraces it, inhabits it and lets it deepen her, rather than just make it feel like it’s added on.”

Part of that darkness comes from the heaviness of fresh grief. In February, after the first preview performance at BAM, Silverman’s mother died of complications from pneumonia.

Her sorrow was overwhelming, but the show helped to keep her afloat.

“It was a lodestar,” she said. “Five o’clock would come and I would feel a little bit lighter, like I knew what I was going to do. I knew I loved doing it.”

“I needed more time with this anchor,” she added.

Today, unsure of how the nomination will change her future, she continues to feel grateful for the work.

“I really just want to be onstage performing in rich and gorgeous plays,” she said. “This role feels like an offering.”