When Ari’el Stachel took the stage of Radio City Music Hall in 2018 to accept the Tony Award for his performance in “The Band’s Visit,” he seemed on top of the world. “I want any kid who’s watching to know that your biggest obstacle may turn into your purpose,” he said at the end of his emotional speech.
But at an after-party later that night, he had to keep bolting to the bathroom for paper towels to blot the flop sweat caused by his social anxiety and lifelong sense of inadequacy.
That juxtaposition between publicly celebrating a professional triumph and privately wrestling with personal turmoil is the focus of Stachel’s new Off Broadway solo play, “Other,” which opens Sunday at the Greenwich House Theater. It is in previews now, and scheduled to run through Dec. 6.
The play tells “the story of a guy who, in what should be the greatest time in his life, crashes the hardest and has to go on a hunt to understand why this is happening,” Stachel, 34, a warm, voluble presence, said in a recent interview.
In the play, Stachel candidly recounts the challenges he has grappled with: his identity issues as part Arab and part Jew (his mother is an Ashkenazi American; his father a Yemenite Israeli); his effort to fit in with middle school classmates by passing for Black on the basketball court; the distance he publicly put between himself and his thick-bearded, dark-skinned father amid anti-Arab sentiment after 9/11; and his push to land more complex acting roles than stereotypes like “Terrorist No. 2.”
Written by Stachel and directed by Tony Taccone, the production also has moments of levity, like when Stachel jokes about the excuses he gave for his profuse, anxiety-induced sweating (spicy curry, a rushed bike ride, faulty air-conditioning). And at times Stachel even breaks into song, gracing the audience with the mellifluous voice that helped win him a Tony.
He takes the audience back to the Bay Area in the mid-1990s, where he grew up and where he first experienced outsiderness. At 5, he received a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Stachel recounts how his therapist encouraged him to name the voice in his head that was “telling you something bad might happen if you don’t do things a certain way.” Stachel settled on naming it Meredith, after the evil stepmom in the movie “The Parent Trap.”
He was the only “brown kid” in his Jewish day school, where a classmate taunted, “You’re too dark to be Jewish!” When his father surprised him after school one day, a friend asked, “That yo pops? Yo daddy A-Rab?”
As he recounts in the play, the young Ari’el stammered in response: “Ummm, man … well … um … that’s not actually my dad … that’s my … uncle … through marriage. … It’s a long story, but my aunt married him, and my real dad died … so … he raises me and calls himself my dad.”
For years, Stachel struggled to figure out who he was and where he belonged.
“I skipped my high school graduation so that I wouldn’t be seen with my dad,” he says in the play. “I was living a double life.”
The first time he told his father about having disavowed him as a child was onstage when he performed the play in Berkeley, Calif.; he couldn’t bring himself to do it any earlier. “When I saw him after, it was like a truck ran through him,” Stachel said in the interview. “I think he felt like he wasn’t able to fully protect me. I don’t see it that way. I just see it as: It’s life. You’re beautiful. Dad, I write this to honor you. I write this to honor your lineage.”
Stachel attended Oakland School for the Arts, which led him to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Eventually, he started getting bit parts on TV shows like “Blue Bloods” and “Jessica Jones.”
“It was not just an escape professionally, but it was my lifeline — my whole life,” Stachel said of acting. “That raw ability to transform came as a survival mechanism that I later learned could be a profession.”
Then came his breakout performance as a womanizing, soulful trumpet player in “The Band’s Visit,” which follows the adventures of a touring Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli village. He received the Tony for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical. (In his review, Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that the actor’s “smooth jazz vocals dazzle in the style of his character’s idol, Chet Baker.”)
Though appreciative of being featured in the acclaimed production, Stachel said the experience was fraught. He said he was not considered for the Israeli roles. Some Middle Eastern actors and fellow cast members questioned why an Israeli was playing an Arab part, even though Stachel is also Arab. And he didn’t feel comfortable in this interstitial state — which made him start thinking about creating his own theatrical work.
“There was never quite a place of rest,” Stachel said. “Part of why I wrote this play is that I have never seen my culture reflected, ever: a Jewish person with roots in the Arab world.
“I didn’t write this play to wave a flag,” he continued. “But I certainly don’t mind that people will come face to face with a Jewish story that is not the Jewish story we’ve heard over and over in this country. It’s time to widen that canon.”
In 2018, Orin Wolf, the lead producer of “The Band’s Visit,” encouraged Stachel to send pages of his work-in-progress to Taccone, then the artistic director of Berkeley Rep Theater, where the play ultimately had its first production in 2023. The show subsequently had a run at Theater J in Washington, D.C., in January 2025, then last summer at Berkshire Theater Group, which also hosted a reading of it in 2024 — all with the previous title, “Out of Character.”
Taccone urged Stachel to focus the play on his anxiety, given the prevalence of mental health issues among young people. “It’s become the touchstone in our world now for generations of kids,” Taccone said. “He’s tapping the cultural zeitgeist. It’s a widespread phenomenon and everyone is relating to it.”
The director also said he initially responded to Stachel’s “level of honesty and transparency,” as did the actress LaChanze, who became the play’s lead producer in New York. “It will create a space of empathy and understanding,” she said. “Right now we’re in a time when we are all so polarized, and I think it would be really helpful for us to see each other as human beings.”
The road after “The Band’s Visit” wasn’t always smooth, which Stachel hints at in the show. In 2021, he left the Public Theater’s adaptation of “The Visitor” out of concern over the musical’s depiction of his Arab American character. (At the time, the theater said in a statement that they had “made a mutual decision that he will step away.”) The show was based on Tom McCarthy’s 2008 film about two undocumented immigrants who help a white middle-aged professor get a new lease on life.
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks in Israel occurred between the play’s first two productions; so Stachel incorporated a reference to the Israel-Gaza conflict in his script, in particular how he straddled his own Arab and Jewish identities. “It was not about the conflict at large, but about how I was trying to piece together this fracture within my family and within my social groups,” he said. “I tried to be a unifier.”
He also talks in the play about deciding to weigh in on the war on social media (“I can try to be a bridge”), only to regret it in the face of harsh blowback.
Particularly contentious, he said, was his Instagram message to Zohran Mamdani, the New York City Democratic mayoral candidate, in which he urged him to “name anti-Semitism clearly,” and said he was willing to partner with him “to create a coalition of Jews and Muslims of every race, every background who believe in a New York that belongs to everyone without erasure.”
Going forward, Stachel said he would like to take part in more projects that represent his identity and experience — projects that “start conversations” and that give opportunities to others with his cultural background. Stachel says he has “a kooky dream” of doing a Yemenite “Fiddler on the Roof.”
While he still sweats under stress, Stachel said his anxiety doesn’t usually get the better of him these days. Ironically, performing the play — wrestling with that fear night after night — is a kind of therapy all its own.
“I only like to live at the depths of my soul,” he said. “That level of intensity is like a sedative for me. I go onstage and I just ring myself out, and now I’m open and other people are open.”
Indeed, his remaining discomfort is outweighed by the strong response he has been getting from audiences, who greet him at the stage door to share their own struggles — of discrimination, of being disabled, of having had parents in an internment camp — and express gratitude for his having made them feel seen and less alone.
“My favorite part of the show is after,” Stachel said. “I believe that it’s actually a service. The way that it cracks people open makes it worth it.
“That has been the reward of this, which is why the cost doesn’t really matter,” he added. “Because, why else be an artist?”
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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