Tony Award-winner Ari’el Stachel brings his one-man show about Jewish identity and generalized anxiety to the Berkshires
By Albert Stern / BJV Editor
STOCKBRIDGE – Some readers may have had the chance to catch Ari’el Stachel’s one-person show Out of Character last summer at the Berkshire Theater Group’s Jewish Plays Project showcase. Those who missed it won’t want to do so again when BTG brings the Tony Award-winning (2018’s best featured actor in a musical, The Band’s Visit) performer back to the Unicorn Theatre for most of the month of July.
When Stachel first embarked on this creative project, his path through the autobiographical material seemed fairly straightforward: child of divorced Jewish parents (Israeli Mizrachi father, Ashkenazi mother) trying to sort out his cultural identity as a Jew and as an American. Dark-skinned like his father, Stachel says he was made to think of himself by as too dark to be accepted as Jewish by his predominantly light-skinned Ashkenazi peers, “which gave me a chip on my shoulder about what it meant to be Jewish. Skin color is something you can’t hide, although my DNA did give me access to different social identities.” He says he always felt closer to his father’s background than to his mother’s, but that he was able to inhabit both Mizrachi and Ashkenazi realms – if not easily than at least with an equal degree of unease.
Stachel’s outlook was transformed when he was 10-years-old and in the 5th grade, after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. “There was a change in brown reality in the USA,” he says, that felt more like divorce than integration. He felt pressure at school and was made uneasy by the way his friends behaved when they met his dark-complexioned Yemenite father, to the point that Stachel avoided being seen with him publicly, even at his high school graduation.
His response was to reinvent himself by passing as black when he enrolled in a high school with a sizeable African American population. Having always found himself too dark for Jews to easily accept, to his new classmates “I was light-skinned with ‘good hair,’” he remembers, “and that gives you quite a bit of status in that community.” Stachel played with that identity until his college years, when the masquerade began to feel “inauthentic.”
In his breakthrough stage role in The Band’s Visit, Stachel played an Egyptian musician, a role that he says “was a way to finally embrace my Middle Eastern identity in a public way.” The show was a massive hit, sweeping the six major Tony Awards for cast, production, and score – one of only four musicals to have achieved that distinction. At the glittering afterparty following the ceremony, Stachel found himself alone in a bathroom paralyzed by a panic attack and recklessly self-medicating. And that is the opening of Out of Character.
“Anxiety has gripped me since I was born,” says Stachel, who was first diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder at age five. For as long as he can remember, “my anxiety latched onto things in the world, and the world found extreme ways to latch on to my anxiety.”
Early in the development of Out of Character, Stachel found himself stymied as he grappled with themes relating to Jewish identity. Fortuitously, he enlisted the help of director Tony Taccone, who early on provided notes about the writing. After Stachel labored on the script for two more years, Taccone came through with a query that proved decisive – Taccone said simply that he just didn’t understand what this character wanted. Stachel answered that he wanted to be less anxious. Taccone to Stachel to explore that.
Something immediately clicked for Stachel. “I started asking questions about why I was doing certain actions,” Stachel says, “and that folded into the myriad issues I had been trying to write about. Now the issues came out naturally, not intentionally, and I started writing about anxiety, which I have been in a relationship with for most of my life and that I thought I could extinguish.” Rather than exorcise his demon, in Out of Character he enters into conversation with it, giving it the persona of Meredith, named after the wicked step-mother from the film The Parent Trap.
Nothing, however, “is wrapped up in a bow” by the end of Out of Character. Tikkun olam is a Jewish value that has a long way to go before in catches up with anxiety as a motivator of Jewish behavior – but still, Stachel asserts that his show is also a comedy, adding that “I see this as part of a long line of Jewish storytelling that I hope will add to the canon of Jewish theater. Expect as many laughs as tears.”
Berkshire Theatre Group presents The Berkeley Repertory Theatre Production of Out of Character, written and performed by Ari’el Stachel and directed by Tony Taccone. It runs from July 2-29 at The Unicorn Theatre, 6 East Street in Stockbridge, with previews on June 30 and July 1. Tickets are available at berkshiretheatregroup.org.