Into the Grindr with the Gay Matchmaking Game: Intercourse, Dying, and Aging in ‘Stealing Sam’

Into the Grindr with the Gay Matchmaking Game: Intercourse, Dying, and Aging in ‘Stealing Sam’

Steven Gallagher’s prize-winning one-man play sees an HIV-positive gay guy within his 40s set about a fraught dual mission—to respect the desires of a-dead buddy and also to see relationship.

Tim Teeman

Elder Publisher and Author

Racheal McCaig

Gender, demise, enjoy, HIV, connections, and online dating over 40: the playwright and star Steven Gallagher and that I talked, from time to time loudly, about this stuff over certain rounds of cocktails one current nights in Toronto.

This Sunday mid-day, Gallagher, 49, gives their award-winning one-person enjoy, taking Sam, to unique York’s joined solamente Theater Festival on Theater Row after a much-garlanded record in Canada, in which it was given Best of edge and Patron’s select at the Toronto edge event in 2013, and was awarded exceptional New Play, manufacturing, star, and Director from Now mag.

For the play, Gallagher takes on Jimmy, that has been family making use of the unseen Sam for more than twenty five years. They certainly were allowed to be dealing with “gay middle age” along. Whenever Sam dies, Jimmy must approach their unique last picnic. Jimmy steals Sam’s cremated keeps through the funeral room and, says Gallagher, “tries to offer his buddy the send-off the guy deserves.”

The 60-minute play series, states Gallagher, “a middle-aged people adrift in an unfriendly dating scene, while he attempts to pick love during the age of myspace and wireless technology. The play examines matchmaking within the post https://datingranking.net/herpes-dating/ HIV/AIDS community, and the stigma that becoming HIV good however brings. They covers life with HIV and also the tips it affects the life span of their sufferers, even though they’re residing healthily with-it.” And, Gallagher reassures united states, “It’s most, most amusing.”

Where performed the theory your enjoy originate from?

I was taking a writing workshop, and another with the tasks was to jot down our very own “obsessions” at the beginning of each evening. I was thinking i desired to create an enjoy regarding Toronto bathhouse raids of 1981, but I quickly noticed that I found myself obsessed with middle age, online dating, and the ways to navigate all of that when you’re one guy of a “certain get older.” I going writing scenes and monologues from perspective of a 48-year-old homosexual people, that I was then, and extrapolated a tale following that.

Exactly how individual is the gamble?

There are numerous personal details inside play. Those facts provided me with a way directly into Jimmy’s tale. As an instance, we are both insomniacs, both of us run a Boxer, so we happened to be both instantly solitary within our 40s. The difference is actually how we manage these elements of our life. I attempted to create a character who helps make the other conclusion that i’d using problems, and go from there—sort associated with the road-not-taken approach to playwriting. I think more playwrights suck heavily off their very own encounters. If you check anybody like Wendy Wasserstein, their plays were items of this lady lifestyle on stage, and I also think individual perspective tends to make a play more believable.

Just what experience of mortality have you had?

Almost all of my personal works deal with passing. I’m a rather delighted individual, but for some need We share they a whole lot. I’m a cancer survivor, therefore I have-been facing my death. We authored a play called Craplicker according to that experiences. The name are awful, the enjoy is actually enjoyable. A dear friend passed away some time ago, and I was at the center of writing one thing, in which he asked me to make the enjoy about your. My enjoy Memorial is all about their latest day or two. In addition, a kind of funny, but unfortunate play.

Available, what exactly is Stealing Sam over?

Stealing Sam is actually precisely how we hook inside period of Facebook and okay Cupid and Grindr, in which with a swipe of a thumb, some body can choose whether you are worth getting in touch with. It’s about people who are still seeking fancy with what can often be a really unfriendly social scene. It’s about loss and forgiveness and keeping someone’s memories alive.

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