Actor-writer Ari’el Stachel performs in his solo autobiographical play, Other, directed by Tony Taccone, at Greenwich House Theater.
Actor Ari’el Stachel commands the stage in Other, his uproarious and vulnerable one-man show about the lifelong struggle to fit in. Directed by Tony Taccone, Stachel mines identity and anxiety for both laughter and truth.
Stachel plays dozens of characters in Other, including himself.
Stachel begins the play, which he wrote, at a moment of triumph in his life: the 2018 Tony Awards afterparty, just after he’s won Best Featured Actor for The Band’s Visit. He deftly impersonates his publicist, a producer, and an adoring fan before seamlessly shifting into himself. But instead of basking in the limelight, Stachel is sweating through a storm of anxiety, blindsided by his sudden celebrity.
He ducks into the bathroom to mop his brow and collect himself—only to be interrupted by the president of CBS Studios, who hails him as the “Arab George Clooney” and promises to make him a star. Stachel takes the card, steps out, and is immediately cornered by a drunken admirer who gushes about how sexy he looked onstage. Overwhelmed, he panics, bolts back into the bathroom, and collapses. The stage goes black.
When the lights rise, Stachel drops the pretense and confides in the audience, owning up to the anxiety that has haunted him since birth:
I’m an incredibly anxious person—if the last scene didn’t make that painfully clear! I used to fantasize about winning a Tony. But hiding in the bathroom all night? Not part of the dream!
Other has two central themes: Stachel’s acute anxiety and his lifelong struggle to master it. At age 5, he was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and, guided by a therapist, he names the voice in his head.
Therapist: Hey, little guy. Your mom told me that sometimes you get a strong feeling you can’t shake—like a voice telling you something bad might happen if you don’t do things a certain way. We call that obsessive-compulsive disorder. But I need your help. I want you to come up with a name for that voice. What should we call it?
Five-year-old Stachel: Um… Meredith! Like the evil stepmom in The Parent Trap!
Tony Award winner Stachel turns the lens inward, tracing his lifelong search for belonging with humor and raw honesty. Photographs by @ogata.
The second major theme is the racism Stachel faced growing up in California, which intensified after 9/11. He was born to an Ashkenazi Jewish American mother studying to be a doctor and a Yemenite Israeli father working as a taxi driver. An unlikely couple, they met while doing Israeli folk dancing in San Francisco, then married, and had Stachel and his older sister, Tali—but divorced when Stachel was barely a year old. He was often caught in the crossfire of their arguments, especially over whether he should be medicated for his OCD. His mother finally prevailed, pointing out to her ex that their son wasn’t “normal”: “He doesn’t eat in front of people with disabilities. He won’t go to school unless he wears the same red pants every day!”
Stachel was repeatedly harassed at school—not only for his OCD but also for his skin color. His parents eventually placed him in a private Jewish day school, but as the only brown kid in his fourth-grade class, he was ridiculed. On the first day of recess, a classmate named Ezra shouted, “You’re too dark to be Jewish.” Enraged, Stachel smacked him.
Later, at home, his father—whom he calls Aba (Hebrew for father)—tried to instill pride in his heritage through Israeli dance. “Ariel, this is the original Jewish music and dancing. From Yemen. Tell him you are a proud Yemenite. And you are proud Israeli. You understand me?”
As narrator, Stachel tells the audience that he took Aba’s advice—but Meredith twisted it, persuading him to speak in his father’s accent. His classmates loved it, and Stachel stayed in character for a year. But, weary of being scolded by his sister Tali, the 9-year-old Stachel finally had a showdown with Meredith:
Nine-year-old Stachel: Meredith! Tali’s right! I’m not speaking in that accent anymore! Everyone thinks I’m weird. And—I’m hungry all the time! So… so… I’m done listening to your stupid rules about not eating in front of disabled people!
Suffice it to say, Stachel dropped the accent, went to a donut shop, and bought a dozen donut holes. Pressing one against his lips, he waited for someone in a wheelchair to roll in—and miraculously, somebody did. “It felt like magic,” he recalls. “For the first time, I stood up to Meredith.”
In Other, Stachel transforms the pain of otherness into connection, turning his lifelong struggles into a shared act of courage and laughter. It’s a raw, funny, and deeply human story of learning to stand up to the voices—both internal and external—that tell us we don’t belong.
Ari’el Stachel’s Other plays through Dec. 6 at Greenwich House Theater (27 Barrow St.). Performance dates and times are somewhat irregular and may be viewed, along with other information, at othertheplay.com.
Playwright: Ari’el Stachel
Director: Tony Taccone
Scenic Design: Afsoon Pajoufar
Lighting & Projections Design: Alexander V. Nichols
Sound Design: Madeleine Oldham
