Local playwright focuses on women, friendships in world debut

She is only 23 years old, but Marblehead playwright Bianca Vranceanu will have her first world premiere this month when her play, “Infinite Moment of Now,” opens at the Larcom Theater in Beverly. The show runs Sept. 12-22. 

The play has an all-female cast and crew.

“It’s really nice to celebrate women on stage and behind the scenes as well,” Vranceanu told the Current.

“Infinite Moment of Now” tells the story of three women friends at three points in their lives — when they are 15, 18 and 28 years old.

“You see over time how their friendship is malleable and changes,” Vranceanu said. “Growth isn’t linear. We explore the idea of what it means to be best friends, to have a friendship of three women. Alliances are broken. They always support each other, but that support looks different.”

All the action in the play is set at a fountain in a town where the friends always meet, Vranceanu explained.

“The fountain serves a critical role,” she said. “It almost has a form of magic in it.”

Vranceanu lived in Marblehead until she was 7, when she moved with her family to Romania (her dad is Romanian, her mother American). She returned to the U.S. to study theater at Northeastern University. After graduating in 2022, she moved back to Marblehead and is now on the board of Marblehead Little Theatre.

She started writing “Infinite Moment of Now” while a student during a play-writing class.

“A professor gave us a prompt to write something that breaks with no point of reversal,” she said. “I took a more metaphorical approach. I immediately knew that I wanted to have three friends. I knew their names. I started writing in almost a stream of consciousness and, through that, I was finding their purpose.”

Vranceanu says “Infinite Moment of Now” is not autobiographical, but her real-life friendships did inspire it to some degree.

“Female friendships have always been so important to me,” she said. “Friends are really chosen family. It’s understanding that, as life goes on, your friendship may grow apart but that what you had in the past always exists.”

Vranceanu listened to jazz while writing, and the music impacted the script.

“There was a saxophone solo that was improvised,” she said. “It sounded like bursts of water from a fountain, and I wanted to mirror the pace of the fountain in the dialogue. You could hear bubbling conflict, rhythm and flow.”

Vranceanu is working on a new play called “Sisterhood of the Survivors” that will have a staged reading event in New Hampshire in October.

“It’s focused on the real stories of human trafficking survivors and is inspired by my volunteer work at a human trafficking center in Romania,” she said.

To learn more about “Infinite Moment of Now” and to get tickets, visit thelarcom.org/infinitemoment.