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It takes a tremendous amount of concentration. My job as an actor is to try and be as fully engaged with the words and with the audience as possible.
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Is it emotional to perform, on your own for an hour? I don’t put on funny hats and play multiple characters. My collaborator, Darcy Evans, and I are very insistent on calling Stealing Sam a “one-person play” and not a solo show. It’s especially difficult because it’s a one-person play, the audience is watching just me. I like a good story, and so I want to make sure that this character is engaging. How easy or difficult did you find to write? We say that we are all fine with it, but how do people really feel? I wanted to examine how people perceive HIV/AIDS in an age where the physical traits of the disease have disappeared, the medication is better, and it’s no longer a death sentence. What messages and themes did you want to explore in the play? It’s about loss and forgiveness and keeping someone’s memory alive. It’s about people who are still trying to find love in what can sometimes be a very unfriendly social scene. Stealing Sam is really about how we connect in this age of Facebook and OK Cupid and Grindr, where with a swipe of a thumb, someone can decide whether or not you’re worthy of contacting. My play Memorial is about his last few days. A dear friend passed away a few years ago, and I was in the middle of writing something, and he asked me to make the play about him. I wrote a play called Craplicker based on that experience. I am a cancer survivor, so I have been faced with my own mortality. I’m a very happy person, but for some reason I write about it a lot. What experiences of mortality have you had? If you look at someone like Wendy Wasserstein, her plays are pieces of her life on stage, and I think that personal point of view makes a play more believable. I think most playwrights draw heavily from their own experiences. I tried to write a character who makes the opposite decisions that I would in certain situations, and take it from there-sort of the road-not-taken approach to playwriting. The difference is how we handle these parts of our lives. For instance, we are both insomniacs, we both own a Boxer, and we were both suddenly single in our 40s. Those details gave me a way in to Jimmy’s story. There are lots of personal details in the play.
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I thought I wanted to write a play about the Toronto bathhouse raids of 1981, but I soon realized that I was obsessed with middle age, online dating, and how to navigate all of that when you're a single man of a “certain age.” I started writing scenes and monologues from the point of view of a 48-year-old gay man, which I was then, and extrapolated a story from there. I was taking a writing workshop, and one of the tasks was to write down our “obsessions” at the beginning of each evening. Where did the idea for the play come from? It addresses life with HIV and the ways it affects the life of its victims, even when they’re living healthily with it.” And, Gallagher reassures us, “It’s very, very funny.”
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The play examines dating in the post HIV/AIDS world, and the stigma that being HIV positive still carries. The 60-minute play shows, says Gallagher, “a middle-aged man adrift in an unfriendly dating scene, as he tries to find love in the age of Facebook and wireless technology. Jimmy steals Sam’s cremated remains from the funeral home and, says Gallagher, “tries to give his friend the send-off he deserves.” When Sam dies, Jimmy must plan their final picnic. They were supposed to be facing “gay middle age” together. In the play, Gallagher plays Jimmy, who has been friends with the unseen Sam for more than 25 years. This Sunday afternoon, Gallagher, 49, brings his award-winning one-person play, Stealing Sam, to New York’s United Solo Theater Festival on Theater Row after a much-garlanded history in Canada, where it received Best of Fringe and Patron’s Pick at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2013, and was awarded Outstanding New Play, Production, Actor, and Director from Now magazine. Sex, death, love, HIV, relationships, and dating over 40: the playwright and actor Steven Gallagher and I spoke, occasionally loudly, about these things over a few rounds of cocktails one recent evening in Toronto.