Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Ari Stachel was living large in 2018. He won the Tony for The Band's Visit, which led to this moment at the Tony Awards.

Ari Stachel: Both of my parents are here tonight, and I have avoided so many events with them because, for so many years of my life, I pretended that I was not a Middle Eastern person. After 9/11, it was very, very difficult for me. I concealed and I missed so many special events with them. They're looking at me right now, and I can't believe it. I'm just so thankful to Oren Wolf, John and John for being courageous. For being courageous, for telling a small story about Arabs and Israelis getting along at a time where we need that more than.

Alison Stewart: He added this for the young people in the audience.

Ari Stachel: I want any kid who's watching to know that your biggest obstacle may turn into your purpose.

Alison Stewart: It was a cathartic moment for Ari. A chance to claim his identity and celebrate a play that meant so much. Then the adrenaline turned to anxiety, and that's where his new off-Broadway show starts. We meet him at the after-party. People are congratulating him, encouraging him, flirting with him. All Ari had to do was keep his anxiety together, and that is probably the biggest acting challenge he faced and has been one he has had his whole life. His new show, titled Other, features Ari at various points in his life where his anxiety commingles with his identity. He's kept them both secret for years until now. Other is at the Greenwich House until December 6th. Ari Stachel, welcome to the studio.

Ari Stachel: Thank you so much. What a pleasure.

Alison Stewart: Can you remind our audience what The Band's Visit was about? What you won the Tony Award for?

Ari Stachel: Sure. The Band's Visit was a very small musical. It was about an Egyptian orchestra that was hired to play a concert in Israel. My character, named Khaled, the joke is that he can't pronounce the letter P, so instead he said B. They end up in a southern town in remote desert of Israel and end up stranded for the night because they can't speak the language and end up having this beautiful moment of connection with the Israeli locals.

Alison Stewart: Why was that such a meaningful role for you? Why was that such a meaningful win for you?

Ari Stachel: I mean, so I spoke about it a little bit in the speech. I hid that I was Middle Eastern for about eight years after 9/11, after being called terrorist and all of the Islamophobia and anti-Arab-ness. I had believed for a large part of my adolescence that I would never reveal that I was Middle Eastern. I even went into college hiding that identity and was encouraged to play roles that I perhaps could get away with playing, such as Hispanic or maybe biracial. Never did I think I would play Middle Eastern.

When I got that role, it felt like life-changing because it was a role that was Middle Eastern and that was proud and that wasn't stigmatized. It was like the ultimate collision of my dreams as an artist with my purpose as a person, which is to humanize this group of people that I had felt so ashamed of being a member of for years and years.

Alison Stewart: Did you plan to say that at the Tony Awards, or did that come from--

Ari Stachel: It came from the gut. I remember the night before, I couldn't sleep, so I wrote a couple notes on my iPhone, and it was like, "What are things that I might want to say?" That just came out. Remarkably, it was exactly 90 seconds. [laughs] No one had to play the orchestra off.

Alison Stewart: What happened to you after? That's where your show starts. You're in the party, people are congratulating you, but there's this anxiety that's inside of you.

Ari Stachel: I think that I had always had this North Star dream of achieving success. I thought as a kid I was in a lot of pain. I was in a lot of pain, and so acting was a refuge for me. I thought that, my God, when one as a 14-year-old, 15-year-old, thinks of themselves accepting a Tony award in front of their parents, life is going to be really, really good after that.

Alison Stewart: It's going to be all good.

Ari Stachel: It's going to be perfect. As it turned out, I was still little old me, and I was little old me with a lot more expectation and a lot more people and eyeballs. I still hadn't made sense of all of that shame. I was having panic attacks every day, both on stage and offstage. Every moment of life was feeling really scary and dangerous to me.

Alison Stewart: When did you start writing?

Ari Stachel: I started writing this play seriously about two months after that Tony Award win. I met a writing coach named Gretchen Cryer, who's a wonderful playwright. I would go up to her apartment on the Upper West Side between my matinee and my evening shows, and I would start telling her parts of my story, and the things that resonated with her, she'd be like, "Oh, that's wonderful. Take that." I would start compiling this thing. What's so funny is, at that time, I was so focused on my identity, and I didn't realize what I was living in real time, which was this debilitating anxiety, was also a major force that needed to make its way into the story.

Alison Stewart: What did it do for you to write it out, your story out? How did it help you emotionally?

Ari Stachel: For the first-- I hooked up with this director, Tony Taccone, who's known for doing epic solo shows like John Leguizamo's, Latin History. I started sending him drafts. For two years, he was like, "Yes, it's close, but it's not there." I kept being like, "What do you want from me?" At one point, we get into a workshop at Berkeley Repertory Theater, and it's almost a confrontation. He's like, "What does your character want? Why are you, as an adult, so obsessed with this kid who hid his identity?"

I said, "I don't know, man." At some point, after 30 minutes of what almost became a fight, I said, "He wants to be less anxious." He said, "Interesting. Leave." Right about that. I came back the next day with 25 pages. I'd never written that much that quickly. That became the urgent thing that this character needed to solve. What it did for me to reveal and finally free myself from years and years of concealing both my identity and my anxiety was it freed me. I found that when we started performing it in its early runs, it seemed to free other people.

Alison Stewart: When did you decide to take it to the stage? Because you can write about it, but then you decide, "Oh, I'm going to perform it now."

Ari Stachel: Talking openly about my OCD and more specifically hyperhidrosis, my sweating disorder that started in my mid-20s, was the thing I never-- I thought at some-- I would try everything. The show talks about this. I tried everything to fix that part of myself. Everything. Nothing worked. I really think of this as my service as an artist. They say that you have to take a risk, and this is a risk for me, and it costs me something. I find that through that risk and performing it, it's the service I can do with the talents that I've been given and that I've worked my whole life to sharpen.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Ari Stachel. His show is called Other. It's at the Greenwich House Theater until December 6th. It says on the flyer I have here, "A dramedy about the anxious art of belonging." Let's talk about the OCD. People have a misconception of what OCD is about. Can you explain OCD?

Ari Stachel: Yes. In the show and in my life, I was put into cognitive behavioral therapy at five years old. The way the therapist described it is that there's a force inside of me telling me something bad might happen if I don't do things a certain way. It's living life constantly have to perform small rituals to feel settled inside. Then the macro experience of OCD is your brain can't turn off. When you get hooked on something, such as for me, writing this play or a character or a food, these are things that you think about all the time. You think that it's normal until you meet enough people to realize, "Oh, this is not exactly normal, but it's my normal."

Alison Stewart: When was the time you felt your OCD kept you from doing what you wanted to do or needed to do?

Ari Stachel: Oh, that's a great question. I think that-- There's a line in the play where I have this reckoning with a friend of mine who's Egyptian American. I say to him, "I keep trying to find out why I'm so anxious." At one point, I say it's because I felt so isolated as an American and we're Middle Eastern and we're seen as a side part of the culture. He says to me, "No, I'm Middle Eastern. I didn't have the same issues with my identity."

I think it was the interplay between my anxiety and my fear of who I was, and the OCD making me obsessed with hiding myself. I think that in many ways my OCD reacted to this post 9/11 environment and made me make a very extreme choice that ended up being very costly years later because of hiding your ethnicity and all of the work that it takes has costs that I'm still paying for.

Alison Stewart: Now, in the early versions of the play, the OCD in the program it was a voiceover, right?

Ari Stachel: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What made you change it to you performing your OCD as a character named Meredith?

Ari Stachel: Yes, well, Meredith. For listeners, Meredith, I was--

Alison Stewart: Not funny, but funny.

Ari Stachel: It is funny. As a five-year-old, I was encouraged by my therapist to name it after-- To give it a name, and the name that I thought was Meredith Blake, after the evil stepmom in The Parent Trap film. I decided that I wanted to play it because I had this idea that maybe if it was a voiceover, the audience might be able to experience it as I experience it. Then I realized the conceit of a solo show is you're watching what theater does best, which is an actor transform and bring to life things in a way that nothing other than live theater can do. It felt like I was distancing myself from something that was really a part of me. It became more playful, it became more real. I found that it became more poignant for audiences.

Alison Stewart: What do you do when you have an audience that isn't quite feeling it? Maybe they're not in the mood exactly. You have to get them to come over to your side. Does Meredith make an appearance on stage that we don't know about?

Ari Stachel: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: Oh, yes.

Ari Stachel: Listen, part of a solo show is different than doing a regular Broadway show, where you have other actors and you can focus on them. The solo show, the other character is the audience. What I've learned in the two and a half years that I've been performing it is that a bad audience can make it more of a bummer, but they can't stop you from doing your show. A good audience can only help you. There's a discipline. Even though it looks spontaneous and off the cuff, I am pursuing an action every single second that I'm on stage, including as the narrator.

What it means is, yes, it sucks when you don't get the laugh that you want, but that doesn't mean you speed up. It doesn't mean that you let Meredith make you so frazzled by that that you stop doing your show. What I would say is that an audience can help the show, but they can't hurt it.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Ari Stachel about his show Other at the Greenwich House Theater. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest in studio is Ari Stachel. His show, Other, is at the Greenwich House Theater until December 6th. Let's talk about your parents. Could you describe them each for us?

Ari Stachel: Sure. My mom is an Ashkenazi Jew who is the daughter of a physicist and a social worker and whose entire life is about service, and who currently runs an organization called We Care Solar that brings solar energy to clinics in sub-Saharan Africa. My father is the son of Yemeni immigrants who arrived to Israel in the late '40s. He is street smart. He is charismatic, charming. He didn't finish high school. They're an unlikely pair, which is why they divorced when I was one. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Did either of them have any sense that you were having identity issues?

Ari Stachel: No, and they didn't because neither of them had any struggle in any way, shape, or form that related to mine. I think my mom was raised around other Ashkenazi Jews. My father was raised in Israel when it was just becoming a country. They were all very excited about this Israeli identity. He was raised around a lot of other Yemenis. I was this fish out of water around at a Jewish day school where I was the only kid of Yemeni descent. I was called terrorist. I went home and I asked my dad, I said, "Are we Arab?" He said, "No, we're Jews." No one in this country seems to think that. It actually has taken this play for them to understand me.

Alison Stewart: That's been interesting. You don't have to share them, but have you had conversations with them?

Ari Stachel: Oh, yes. The show deals with some tough stuff.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it does.

Ari Stachel: Part of the show for listeners is a great source of my anxiety and my shame was that every time my father would meet a peer at school, they would compare him to Osama bin Laden. It happened so many times that by the time I went to high school, I decided that I would create a story that I didn't have a dad. I worked really, really, really hard to hide my family life or my social life. It felt like a great solution then, and it obviously wasn't.

I had never revealed some of the things to my dad, and he saw that for the first time on stage at Berkeley Rep. Because, for whatever reason, it feels safer to say it on stage than it does interpersonally. I don't know why, but it does as an artist. It is heavy. I feel freer that he understands me more.

Alison Stewart: What questions did he have for you?

Ari Stachel: My dad is someone who's extremely accepting and loving. He just loves me. He didn't really have questions. He just felt-- It's so hard for me when he's in the audience, every time. He didn't have questions. We do talk a lot nowadays about why I call myself Arab. That's something that he and a lot of Jews feel like, "We can't be Arab Jews." It doesn't feel real to me. I spent my entire professional career playing Arab characters. I feel something in my blood when I look at other Arab people that makes it very clear to me that we share ancestry.

Then I did a lot of research, and I found that Yemenite Jews share a lot of DNA with the Yemeni Muslim population. I think that it's really created conversations about-- and it's advanced his sense of who he is, as a matter of fact.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Ari Stachel: The dive that I've done, because for him, he said, "I'm Jewish and I'm Yemenite." He understood that. For me, being raised in America and having so many questions about who I am has forced him to confront his own identity in a new way.

Alison Stewart: You spend a large part of the show describing your period of passing.

Ari Stachel: Yes, yes, yes, yes, right.

Alison Stewart: Most people, it's like people pack from Black to white, but you pass from Arab Jew to a Black, which is a little wild when you think about it. When you put it in your head, you're like, "Wow." Why did that make sense to you to pass for Black?

Ari Stachel: Imagine being 10 years old after 9/11, and kids calling you Osama bin Laden, and you want to do anything but be who you are. One magical day, you go onto a basketball court, and another Black kid sees you as one of his own. In a single moment, you are the culture.

Alison Stewart: The light bulb goes off.

Ari Stachel: You are the culture. It gave me a level of social freedom at school. The cost was very heavy emotionally, but at school, all of a sudden, it was like this magical transformation that if I adjust the way that I talk a little bit, I can manipulate the way that I'm seen and have this completely different social experience. As a kid, it sort of, in some weird contorted way, felt free to me. It felt like I don't have to live in this shameful Middle Eastern post-9/11 identity. I can exist as of the culture. I can listen to 50 Cent, I can dress how I want to, I can talk how I want to, I can have a certain swagger on the basketball court. Of course, that might seem stereotypical to some, but for a 13, 14, 15-year-old kid, it just makes sense.

Alison Stewart: When did it stop making sense? It worked for a while.

Ari Stachel: In my early years of college, when I was at NYU and didn't want my dad to come to my shows to out me. I thought to myself, "Am I going to hide who I am forever?" It created this-- As a 13-year-old, it was fun on the basketball court, but you have very artificial relationships. Everyone that you know can't know who your dad is. It just got to a point where I was living such a fractured life that it felt unsustainable to have an adult life.

Alison Stewart: How did your anxiety deal with that?

Ari Stachel: My anxiety, as you've learned, is very loud. If I have anxiety, I'm going to put it on stage. I'm someone who tries to force myself through force of will to overcome these fears. I did a lot of things that were external to try to find pride. I put a poster of Yemenite Jews on my wall, and I started developing Middle Eastern community. I tried to do all these external things to reinforce that I didn't feel shame about who I was.

Alison Stewart: I noticed there's a lot of music in the show. Talk to me a little bit about the choices you made.

Ari Stachel: The show is called Other, and the music, I think, if one listened to all the different snippets, both that I sing and songs, it is Other. I mean, it's very eclectic. I have ancient Yemeni hymns, I have 50 Cent, I have show tunes, I have Fiddler on the Roof, and it's a life, and it's my life. It feels like the tapestry of what I'm learning. The reason why the title is Other is because a lot of people straddle all of these different cultures and identities. The music is something that viscerally brings people into these various periods of my life, but also, it seems, brings them into their own experience of their lives, too.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting, at the beginning of the show, you ask people, anybody out there with anxiety, and there are a hand or two raised. What does that tell you?

Ari Stachel: It tells me that we're all going through it at the same time in real time. It's a lovely moment because it immediately, I feel, brings people into the story. By the end of that question, everyone-- There's usually two people that don't raise their hand. I poke fun at them, but everyone else does. It says that we're going through something as a culture. I'm really happy to be standing on the shoulders of other public figures that I really admire who are opening up about it.

One person that opened up about his depression was Kevin Love. Hearing that an NBA player opened up about their mental health freed me. My shoulders dropped. That is what I'm trying to do, both for myself and for the people who are in the Greenwich House Theater with me every night.

Alison Stewart: How many people appear on stage? How many people do you play in a night?

Ari Stachel: Lazily, we say 40. I've never counted, but it's probably a little bit more. I'm playing every race, every gender, every age, everything.

Alison Stewart: What's been the response?

Ari Stachel: The response has been really overwhelming. What I find to be so beautiful and I'm grateful for is that people have a lot of different entry points. There was, two days ago, an older gay couple in their 70s, and they felt like they related so deeply to this experience of having to hide who they were for their whole lives. These are people who are theatergoers who probably like Hello, Dolly, but found themselves in the story. Then, on the other hand, there's people who-- I remember there was a Japanese couple who talked about their parents being in internment camps and wanting to hide their Japanese identity. What really the show is about, on some level, is about hiding who you are and about the audacity it takes to just be who you are.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is Other. It's at the Greenwich House Theater until December 6th. My guest has been Ari Stachel. Thanks for coming in.

Ari Stachel: It's the biggest pleasure. Thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: Deliver Me From Nowhere is the new Springsteen biopic that released in theaters over the weekend. The movie is based on a book by author and musician Warren Zanes. Coming up next, Warren joins me in studio. That's happening after the news.