Serendipity
There are so many readings of new plays in NYC that we could go to a different one every day, sometimes more than once a day. Even when we limit ourselves to specific types of plays, plays where there is a hip hop connection, there are still quite a few to keep track of.
We’re human. We sometimes go to the wrong one.
This happened the other day. I thought a friend of Rhymes Over Beats was doing a reading of a play she had written. I couldn’t go, and our Associate Artistic Director couldn’t go. So I asked our staff person, who is on the hip hop side of the collective, to go.
She went, and loved it.
The only problem was that I was wrong. The reading was not a play written by our friend, but was a play written by another writer – one that we did not know. Yet. But she is a talented playwright, and is now on our radar.
Luck
This experience caused me to reflect on how so much of the success in this business is due to luck.
I know you have to be talented. I know you have to be persistent and never give up. But sometimes that’s not enough.
You could have written a great play, and you can be sending it out to every theater company you can think of and every producer you know – and still not have a positive outcome.
And then there are situations where a producer you don’t know, and didn’t invite, will go to the wrong reading and fall in love with your play. Because you have “a little bit of luck.”
Do you believe in luck? I do!
Send your scripts to me at patrickrobad@gmail.com – you never know!