Bern grew up on Long Island, graduated from Kent School in Kent CT., spent a year in Switzerland, and graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York in 1971.
His first professional work was with the now-defunct PAF Playhouse in Huntington, NY. A period of 7 years took him across the country to Seattle and back to New York.
Bern and his wife, Betsy, a stage manager and costumer, “retired” from the theater world to raise a family in Marshfield, MA, where they still live. Betsy teaches English at Cardinal Spellman High School in Brockton, MA.
When the kids were grown, Bern returned to the stage by way of community theater, to test his “chops”. Several shows with Bay Players in Duxbury and Plymouth on the South Shore - as both an actor and director - led to his becoming President of that group. He produced, directed. and acted in radio plays for TIC, a radio reading service based in Marshfield that serves the blind and print-disabled community. Moving north along Rte. 3, getting ever closer to Boston, Bern appeared with the North River Theatre in Norwell, Company Theatre in Norwell, Curtain Call Theatre in Braintree, and Fiddlehead Theatre in Norwood.
Bern’s first professional show in Boston was with Ubiquity Stage, as Claudius in “Hamlet”. Then it was Warwick/Matrevis in “Edward II” with Pet Brick Productions, a summer of Shakespeare with the Publick Theatre, several shows at Wellesley College (two of which won NETC Moss Hart Awards), another summer at the Publick, more shows at Wellesley, and “The Miser” at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. All this time he was working on and refining “Mark Twain Talks”, the one-man show he has been performing since 2002.
Bern is a member of The National Storytelling Network, The League for the Advancement of New England Storytelling (LANES), SoloTogether, and StageSource, and is on the roster of the Vermont Humanities Council Speakers Bureau and the New England States Touring Roster of the New England Foundation for the Arts.