Ari'el Stachel Delivers Inspiration and Perspiration in His Solo Show Other

In 2018, Ari’el Stachel won a Tony Award for crooning like Chet Baker as the indefatigably flirtatious Egyptian musician Haled in The Band’s Visit. From the Radio City stage, he delivered a tearful speech celebrating his parents, sharing regrets about the years he spent hiding his Middle Eastern heritage, and lifting up his show’s victories in the name of Jewish and Arab representation. Within a few hours, he was having a panic attack on the bathroom floor of a glitzy afterparty venue.

Stachel reenacts the scene—a frenzy of fake smiles, flop sweat, and hits of weed—in the opening sequence of his solo play Other, directed by Tony Taccone at the Greenwich House Theater. The show had prior regional runs as Out of Character, but its new title better cinches the play’s parallel threads. One is Stachel’s lifelong battle with obsessive compulsive disorder, a torrent of intrusive thoughts he, a ‘90s child, personified as Parent Trap villain Meredith Blake. The second is the actor’s messy road to reconciling his splintered identity as a Yemenite Israeli-American Jew in post-9/11 America. Each carries its own struggle (and a smattering of colorful characters), but it’s clear that one tormented hand washes the other.

It’s a lot to weave into a single act, and Stachel, along with Taccone and dramaturg Madeleine Oldham, have landed on a lean script performed with charm, vulnerability, and moments that push catharsis to the brink of exorcism. Sweat, Stachel tells us up front, is Meredith’s evil way of revealing herself. So, he says, “It’s very likely I’ll sweat my ass off during the show.” He makes good on the promise. And when he does, you feel privy to his inner life, not just the bits he’s chosen to show you in his dramatized biography.

That said, Stachel has chosen to show his audiences quite a bit that’s not guaranteed to curry favor or sympathy. He notably shares how, trying to conceal the Yemeni identity that peers equated with “terrorist,” he spent his teens pretending his biological father was Black, while the thickly accented brown man who called himself “Aba” was his uncle by marriage. Call it a cancellable offense, but it’s how a desperate young brain solved an impossible problem.

He wades into other hot-button debates, detailing a meeting with his college MENASA group (students of Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian descent) that snowballs into a heated argument about the casting limitations for Middle Eastern actors. Meanwhile, a Lebanese classmate calls Stachel a “settler” when he lands his Egyptian role in The Band’s Visit, arguing that an Israeli can’t also be Arab. It’s a bitter game of identity tug-of-war that comes to a head after October 7, when Stachel posts a video he thinks will be bridge-building but lights a bonfire of antisemitism (projection designer Alexander V. Nichols creates a fitting moment of visual overwhelm).

Stachel doesn’t catapult himself into political third rails, but it’s impossible not to graze them considering the nature of his own struggles. And that’s the part of Other that gets its hooks in you: the illustration of how a person’s sheer existence can spark so much external conflict. Regardless of psychological makeup, internal conflict is never going to be far behind. Neither will the “other” box that passively waits to banish you to the black hole of American culture. Stachel, for a time, did the banishing himself. Now he’s ready to go down sweating.