New York ? On a recent, warm spring day, Lily Rabe took off her scarf and sunglasses and looked around New York City’s sun-drenched Stuyvesant Park.

“Days like this,” she said, “make me wish I was still in college.”

It’s a strange desire, especially when you consider that Rabe — not yet a year removed from her graduation from Northwestern University — is already performing to some acclaim on Broadway.

The 22-year-old is making her Broadway debut as the innocent, devoutly religious Annelle in the current revival of “Steel Magnolias,” part of a cast that includes established actresses such as Delta Burke, Marsha Mason and Tony Award winners Christine Ebersole and Frances Sternhagen.

The daughter of playwright David Rabe and actress Jill Clayburgh finds herself excelling in a professional situation that might intimidate most of her peers. And she’s the only actress from the “Steel Magnolias” cast to receive a Drama Desk nomination, for best featured actress in a play.

“I can’t imagine a better thing to have happened than to be in this play with this group of women and this director and have this kind of a part,” Rabe said.

With her parents’ show biz experience — her mother has been nominated for two Academy Awards and her father is a Tony winner whose play “Hurlyburly” is being revived in an Off-Broadway production starring Ethan Hawke — Rabe was no stranger to the world of acting as a child.

Still, her parents never encouraged her to become an actor and she focused on dance while growing up in Connecticut. When she gave up dance in high school, she quickly discovered that she missed performing and she turned to acting.

“Once I did it,” she said, “I fell in love with it fast and hard.”

Actress Lily Rabe, daughter of playwright David Rabe and actress Jill Clayburgh, makes her Broadway debut in the current revival of Steel

Her parents, after an initial apprehension, soon embraced their daughter’s dream.

“I think they were relieved that they had had nothing to do with it, that I sort of found it on my own and fell in love with it on my own,” Rabe said.

So, after four years at Northwestern, Rabe returned to the Northeast and soon found herself trying out for “Steel Magnolias.” However, her first audition wasn’t for the part of Annelle, but for Shelby, the young beauty with diabetes played by Rebecca Gayheart (and portrayed in the popular movie version by Julia Roberts, who earned her first Oscar nomination for the role).

Director Jason Moore was impressed by Rabe’s audition, but Rabe wasn’t what Moore and the producers had in mind for the part. Then she auditioned for Annelle, a shy and unsure character who is quite unlike the articulate and sociable Rabe.

“When she walked out we all kind of looked at each other,” Moore said. “We knew when she left the room that it doesn’t get better than that.”

In the world of “Steel Magnolias,” which takes place entirely within the walls of a beauty shop in a small Southern town, everybody knows everything about everybody — except Annelle. Recently left by her husband and desperate to find a job, Annelle is the outsider, still trying to discover who she is while being surrounded by, and often doing the hair of, five strong Southern ladies.

“In reading the play and in knowing the play from before, I always was sort of drawn to her because she does have that growth and all of those changes, and I think there’s nothing more fun to be able to do,” Rabe said.