At Berkeley Rep: One man’s odyssey to hide who he was after national tragedy

Ari’el Stachel was in fifth grade when 9/11 happened. And all of a sudden he didn’t want to be perceived as Middle Eastern anymore.

A Berkeley native who later won a Tony Award for his role in “The Band’s Visit,” Stachel has quite a personal odyssey to tell in his solo show “Out of Character,” now premiering at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

“I was raised as a Yemenite Jewish Ashkenazi kid here in the Bay Area,” Stachel says. “And that became kind of uncomfortable for me for a number of reasons, but 9/11 was a big part of that. It became really uncool to be Middle Eastern. I developed a friendship with a kid in seventh grade who was Black, and he really accepted me and took me under his wing.

“I sort of developed this persona during my friendship with him, and that led me on to a years-long journey of appropriating other identities to survive socially growing up. You can be the same in the same skin color, the same body, the same look, but if you dress a certain way, talk a certain way, and rearrange who you are to some extent, the perception of you can change a great deal. And for me, that gave me a lot of social mileage.”

“This charade grew and grew,” he adds, “It lasted through most of middle school and high school and my first couple years of college, which are really formative years to be denying your heritage.”

Stachel won his Tony Award playing an Egyptian trumpet player lost in Israel in “The Band’s Visit,” bringing that journey full circle in a way.

“After I did ‘The Band’s Visit,’ there were a lot of opportunities,” Stachel says. “And the first thing that I said to my management team was that I wanted to do a solo show. And that wasn’t a popular idea. It was a weird next step. But I was obsessed with it.”

In 2018 he contacted former Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone out of the blue about possibly directing his play.

At 10 years old Stachel had seen Sarah Jones perform a solo show called “Surface Transit” at Berkeley Rep directed by Taccone, who later directed her acclaimed “Bridge & Tunnel” at the Rep and on Broadway.

“It was just the most incredible evening of theater,” he says. “And so I knew at that age that I wanted to perform in that style.”

“I was working at the Public (Theater) on Leguizamo’s show when Ari flagged me down,” Taccone says, referring to the musical “Kiss My Aztec,” which Taccone co-wrote with John Leguizamo. The show later premiered at Berkeley Rep as the last production Taccone directed as artistic director in 2019, bringing to a close his much-acclaimed 33 years at the theater and 22 years at the helm.

“Ari’s a Bay Area kid, so he kind of knew my work,” Taccone continues. “I was like, I will meet with you, hear you out, and then we’ll see what happens. At the end of the first meeting, I said, ‘Look, I’m not sure I’m going to direct this at all. I’m not there with it yet. But send me another draft based on what we talked about.’ I had read his first draft, and while it was interesting, it was nowhere near ready as a play. I had to see whether or not he had the discipline and the talent to write a draft based on some very different ideas from what he had written. And he did. He kept answering the bell every time I rang it.”

Stachel and Taccone hadn’t met before but Taccone had previously worked with “Band’s Visit” book writer Itamar Moses on his play “Yellowjackets” at Berkeley Rep. Moses is also a Berkeley native and Berkeley High alum, albeit of a different generation. Stachel went to Berkeley High for one year, then transferring to Oakland School for the Arts.

“I had spoken about this to Itamar a little bit,” Stachel says. “I have a Yemenite father, and so that made me in this country be perceived as brown. Itamar, on the other hand, is Ashkenazi, and therefore was seen as white. And so our experiences at Berkeley High were completely different. On so many levels our backgrounds are the same, but it speaks to how important your skin color is in what shapes your social reality in this country.”

“I have to say, I was not particularly excited about a solo show,” Taccone recalls. “I’ve done a bunch of ’em and I’ve enjoyed all of them, but they are a particular kind of work that’s not even like directing. It’s more like being a midwife or something. With most shows, the cast has relationships, and it’s like being the mayor of a village or something. This is like a village of one, and you’re the other person there, so it requires a different kind of relationship structure. I just wasn’t sure if I was up for that again. But Ari’s a compelling guy. He’s talented and his story was interesting.”

Some of the other artists Taccone has worked with on solo shows in the past include Leguizamo, Rita Moreno, Danny Hoch and Carrie Fisher.

“It took us a good three years to crack the story,” Taccone says. “He started out writing a piece about identity, and he ended up discovering that the piece was as much, if not more, about anxiety. And when he discovered that, it made it more personal, more truthful, more compelling.”