In the wings

In the mid-'90s, Jeff Award–winning actress Maureen Gallagher read an article about photojournalists working in strife-torn South Africa during its first democratic elections. Years later, Gallagher traveled twice to South Africa, talked with photojournalists, and penned her first play, Martin Furey's Shot, about a photojournalist caught in a work-life bind between South Africa and Chicago.

Time Out Chicago: What is it about photojournalists that got you thinking?
Maureen Gallagher: They're photographing suffering, they're getting in people's faces who are grieving or in pain or dying, and that's all they can do about it, is to take the picture. I've heard them say that sometimes they would be in a famine and people are crying out for food and they have no food. They just have that camera.
TOC: And then they return to their own lives.
MG: And also sometimes, as happens in the play, [they're] winning the Pulitzer and having accolades and parties for this wonderful thing that they've produced. And I think that there's a lot of conflicted feelings about that...[They feel] frustration sometimes when people see their photos in the paper and just flip by them. "Who cares? Those people are always fighting."
TOC: Have you picked up a camera yourself?
MG: Um, no. I'm actually embarrassingly ignorant about photographing. In rehearsals, we've had some Chicago photojournalists come in to help us.
TOC: To learn how to handle the cameras?
MG: Yeah, because all three of the photojournalists helping us said that it drives them nuts in movies or in plays when people are taking fake stances and things. [They're also teaching us] how you dive in the dirt with your camera and not mash it to pieces.
TOC: Is your character, Martin Furey, furious?
MG: He cares passionately about what he's doing and really wants to tell the story, and he's also a vulnerable, raw kind of guy who has trouble seeing what he sees and then trying to make a safe life with his girlfriend in Chicago and have that, too. Because these guys and women are not always these rock-star photojournalists who just travel around and never want to come home.
TOC: Why should we see your play?
MG: My director, Anna, put in the program this quote of Thoreau's: "Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?" And I also find the story of South Africa just fucking amazing. When I was in South Africa, it's just in the air, what they accomplished there.—Novid Parsi

Martin Furey's Shot is playing at TimeLine Theatre through June 19.