Irish Actor Meets Ugandan Orphan

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/nyregion/irish-actor-meets-ugandan-orphan-and-adopts-him.html

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Odin O’Callaghan, fourth-grade boy, sat in a theater in Chelsea next to Johnny O’Callaghan, his dad and an actor.

Would Odin be coming to his father’s performances in “Who’s Your Daddy?” a play opening off Broadway next week about his very own adoption from a Ugandan orphanage by a depressed, single Irish actor living in Los Angeles?

“Oh no,” Odin, 11, said. “I’m not coming to it at all.”

“Not right for him yet,” Mr. O’Callaghan said.

A few minutes with the script, written by Mr. O’Callaghan, showed it had been prudent. To begin with, there is adult libido sloshing all over the place. Then Mr. O’Callaghan took pick and ax to the reality of his family life to mine it for high, piercing farce, especially the blunt reactions of his parents and brothers and sister back in Ireland.

“They don’t censor themselves,” he explained, sitting in his dressing room at the Irish Repertory Theater after Odin had headed off to school.

In the play, he calls his mother to let her know that he has been in Uganda and is trying to adopt a 3-year-old boy. Mother O’Callaghan is aghast.

Her gay, gadabout son.

“University ruined you!” she says. “First, it made you a vegetarian, and then you broke that one-legged girl’s heart — the richest girl in Ireland — after I told you to stay away from the queer boys in the theater.”

His elder brother, Thomas, says the adoption plan is not normal.

“It’s not normal to want to adopt my own son?” Johnny says.

“Your own son! Do you hear yourself?” Thomas sputters. “What part are you not getting? He’s black. He should have black parents.”

“Then I should have had gay parents,” Johnny replies.

Warming to the topic, his mother scoffs at the very notion of his taking care of another human.

“Do you know, there are so many ‘normal’ people trying to adopt, waiting years, God love them,” she says.

“I wouldn’t give you a goldfish to look after,” she adds. “Remember what happened to your dog?”

Ah yes, the dog. In a way, the story begins with Mr. O’Callaghan’s missing dog, Charlie.

After four splendid years in New York, living stacked with roommates in an apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, working in theater as far from Broadway as it gets, and bartending to pay the rent, he got a big break when Jack Nicholson’s agents saw him in an HBO movie. He moved out to Los Angeles. More space. Sunshine. A dog, Charlie. Beautiful men and women for what he described as his “fluid sexuality,” though he preferred men. He got a recurring part in “Stargate Atlantis,” a sci-fi television series. Then it started feeling hollow.

A rock-star boyfriend dumped him. Almost immediately, Charlie, the loyal and faithful dog, disappeared. Drinking too much, Mr. O’Callaghan wanted to die. As he was tacking up fliers for his missing dog, an actress friend spotted him, and invited him to help her film a documentary about an AIDS orphanage in Uganda.

“Who’s Your Daddy?” is about the nine months that followed. With no plans to start a family, he meets a 3-year-old boy in the orphanage, and is determined to adopt him.

Scheming and bribing — he is brought around the countryside to get the approval of six separate tribal leaders, each of whom supposedly had to be paid to stamp the paperwork with what turned out to be a smiley face — he managed to do it.“I got resistance from people here who said, ‘You’re taking him away from his culture,’ ” Mr. O’Callaghan said. “His culture was basically living in a concrete box with 50 other children. It wasn’t like he was seeing the elephants or the giraffes or any of the beautiful culture of Africa. He was lucky if he got a meal each day.”

Odin, now a United States citizen, became the center of his father’s world. Mr. O’Callaghan got a master’s degree in psychology so he could open a therapy practice with the regular hours needed by a single parent. Africa had scraped off his own gloom.

“Depression is a luxury that you can have in the West,” he said.

The O’Callaghan family has taken heartily to Odin.

“My mom, Mary, is a big smoker, and Odin’d be like, ‘Don’t — stop smoking!’ She’d go, ‘You and me cigarettes, luv, ye’re the only comforts I have.’ ”

His father, John, a cabdriver, has a fake eye. “He used to pop it out for Odin,” Mr. O’Callaghan said. “Scare the living daylights out of him. But very loving. That’s how he’d show his affection.”

Now, Mr. O’Callaghan said, “They deny everything.”

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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