Solo Fest 2025 Spotlight: Ben Chau-Chiu’s LUCKY CHANCES

Join us for PlayGround’s eighth annual Solo Performance Festival, a curation of the best in California solo performance! The festival runs January 24-February 9, 2025 (Fri-Sun), presented live on our stage and also simulcast online. More…

Today we’re spotlighting Ben Chau-Chiu’s Lucky Chances (1/26, 2/1, & 2/9 at 7pm). Lucky Chances is a collection of romantic tales and meet cutes, some real and some imagined, told in storybook fashion to the audience. This piece explores love, relationships, and intimacy, and how each of those evolve over time as we meet potential, or realized, partners.

Hear from the playwright:

What was the seed of this play? What inspired you to write it?
The past few years I’ve gone through a lot of change in my personal life and it prompted me to reflect on the many relationships in my life, whether they be friends/family/partners/etc. There’s been quite a lot of queering and expansiveness to my views on love and how I approach it. But the inciting events that really pushed me to write this play were a couple meet-cute situations I experienced in the past year. That got me thinking about how we approach connections in our life, particularly romantic connections. How we are taught to view romance and love and intimacy in a very cis-het-mono-normative way. So with this piece I wanted to explore how my views of love have changed over time and why. There’s also something validating (and scary) to share stories of love through a queer Asian body because that’s something we don’t often get to see portrayed.

Why is a solo show the ideal way to tell this story?
I think there’s something special about being able to witness how a person’s perspective on a topic changes over time, and what causes them to change. I mean that’s why we love stories, isn’t it? And while the story is about multiple people, it’s really about how this one person gets affected them over time, so doing it as a solo-show is a way to lean into the idea of, “Each of us are the main character in our story, while everyone else comes and goes through the chapters of our lives.”

What are your artistic influences for this show?
Sara Porkalob’s Dragon Trilogy and Hold These Truths by Jeanne Sakata are a huge influence on how I view solo-performance. The style I use to incorporate dialogue and my present-day reflections are heavily inspired by them. Very early pre-drafts and ideas for this show were heavily influenced by rom-coms and stories I grew up with. But I don’t feel the current version of the play reflects that influence so much.

What surprised you during the creation of this piece?
I was surprised at how much I could write. I was surprised at how fortunate I’ve been in my relationships to have such loving and caring partners. I was surprised at how easy it was to track my change of perspective from relationship-to-relationship. At how hard it was to condense pivotal moments from real life that really took months or years and fit them into a page or two.

Is there anything audiences should know about you or your piece before they attend? And/or is there anything else you want to share about your piece?
Often in times of hardship, I find myself leaning into those I love and care about. I hope that in sharing this piece, others will be able to lean into their own versions of love as well.

Ben Chau-Chiu (LUCKY CHANCES) is an actor and director based in the Bay Area. They are a company member and ambassador with PlayGround SF, and have directed and performed with both the SF and NY companies. They’ve also been fortunate to work on multiple productions at A.C.T., Cal Shakes, and SF Shakes. As well as working on shows at Shotgun Players, SF Playhouse, 42nd Street Moon, and Berkeley Rep. benchauchiu.com