Tony Winner Ari’el Stachel on Anxiety, Identity and His Solo Show Other

Ari’el Stachel’s new solo show Other begins on the night he won a Tony Award for The Band’s Visit in 2018. The moment looked like triumph, but beneath the surface he was unraveling. The autobiographical piece explores the divide between how life appears and what it actually feels like. It’s running at Greenwich House Theater through December 6, directed by Tony Taccone.

Stachel told Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens that the inspiration came straight from that chaotic night. “I’m having panic attacks at the after party,” he said. “I’m getting accosted by well-wishers, and I’m having trouble accepting that praise, feeling comfortable, feeling calm.” That contrast, he explained, became the spark for Other. “It was an interesting entry point for the play: a juxtaposition between what the world might assume would be the greatest night of my life, and then what was actually happening for me inside.”

He thought the Tony would quiet the self-doubt and anxiety that had followed him since childhood. “I certainly thought that winning a Tony Award might really help that,” he said. “Like you would sort of feel like with that achievement, I could walk into the world with my shoulders up and feel confident, but the opposite happened, which is that I was still little old me.” It “took two years after winning the award to confront anxiety as something not that I will eventually eliminate from my life but that I need to hold hands with.”

That reckoning led him to look closer at where his unease began. “I am the son of a Yemenite Israeli father who was a taxi driver when he moved to this country, and my mom is an Ashkenazi Jew,” he said. He was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder at age five, which meant “living both with something that was very intense psychologically and also straddling these two cultures.”

Growing up in Northern California, Stachel’s mixed heritage became harder to navigate after 9/11. “I was called ‘Osama’ in middle school,” he recalled. “After that, I wanted to pass as something else. I wanted to disappear into a version of myself that wouldn’t make people uncomfortable.” That instinct to hide his Middle Eastern identity became a central thread of Other, as he examines the cost of denial and the long path back to self-acceptance.

“Because I had different languages at the house and also my OCD, I would get obsessed with how people would talk.” That curiosity became his creative engine, something he explores in Other, where he embodies dozens of characters, including his OCD, personified as Meredith. (He took the name from the calculating fiancée in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap.) “Creating the character of Meredith was very challenging,” he said. “It took a lot of work because my OCD likes real things, but inventing a character that exists in my mind that is theatrical is really hard.” He eventually based her physicality on an interview he found of Eartha Kitt.

Stachel, who lives with hyperhidrosis, a condition that causes excessive sweating, also folds that physical vulnerability into the show. “Within the first three minutes I say, ‘I’m gonna sweat my ass off throughout the show,’ and it gives me freedom,” he said. “It’s my truth. I think a lot of people feel free because they’re seeing my truth.”

Other (previously titled Out of Character) was developed at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Theatre J in Washington, D.C. and Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts before landing in New York City. Off-Broadway, Stachel says, the show has connected with audiences in a deeper way. “This play here in New York has resonated in ways that it hasn’t anywhere else, and I have to give a shout-out to LaChanze, who’s my lead producer,” he said. “She brought in a really diverse audience, and it has blown me away how they see themselves in my story.”

For Stachel, the show represents a release. “After all these years of hiding, I’m doing the show because I can’t hide anymore,” he said. “I refuse to hide anymore.”

Watch the interview below!