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The fourth edition of the Playwriting Workshop led by actor and writer Mimi Brănescu will conclude with a series of staged readings presented between June 2 and 6, 2026, at the Media Hall of the National Theater of Bucharest. Conceived by Mimi Brănescu with the support of the National Theater of Bucharest (TNB), the project reflects, with each edition, the Bucharest National Theater’s ongoing commitment to supporting the new generation of playwrights and fostering their artistic debuts on a professional theater stage.

I started writing not because I ever thought I had anything important to say, but because I noticed that some things, if you don’t put them down somewhere, start to weigh too heavily on you. “In the Lead Role, Nora” was born from these small observations about relationships, the industry, intimacy, and the way people end up playing roles even in their personal lives.

We are probably the most self-aware generation yet. We have access to information, therapy, and language, and yet we continue to love the wrong people, repeat the same patterns, and build our lives around stories we already know we can’t sustain until the end. Nora is, in a way, a contemporary person caught between everything she understands and everything she has not yet managed to change.

I graduated from UNATC in 2018 and have spent the last ten years in independent theater. I’ve grown alongside a community, a company, and thousands of audience members I’ve met after performances. I think that’s where my interest in intimate stories and characters who don’t have spectacular answers comes from. I’m more interested in people than in ideas, and in questions rather than conclusions. Right now, I’m finishing my master’s degree in film acting and the playwriting workshop led by Mimi Brănescu. I resemble Nora more than I’d like to admit; together, we’re searching for our identities.

“In the Lead Role, Nora” isn’t about feminism or about victims and aggressors in the simplistic sense in which we like to divide the world today. The characters in this story are lucid enough to see their own mechanisms and human enough to remain, at times, trapped within them. I think it is precisely this fragile distance between what we understand and what we manage to transform that fascinates me most when I write about people. It’s about how hard it becomes to stay whole in an industry, in a city, in a time when everyone is constantly trying to understand themselves, and about how, sometimes, even when you see the truth very clearly, you continue to negotiate with it.

Translated by Andreea Codrea-Boeriu