Theatre has always been one of the most powerful spaces for self-reflection. It is intimate and raw, placing us in the dark together while a performer unfolds a story that demands our attention. Unlike film or television, there is no screen to hide behind, no pause button, no escape. We share the same room, the same air, and we can’t look away.

Ari’el Stachel’s new solo play — originally staged as Out of Character and now retitled Other — leans fully into that vulnerability. Stachel, who grew up with a Yemeni-Jewish father and a European Ashkenazi mother, has lived his life moving between worlds. His Jewish story is the entry point, but the performance quickly expands outward. He is able to pass as Jewish, Arab, Middle Eastern, and even Black, depending on context. At times, this mobility is liberating, opening doors to multiple communities. At others it is alienating, leaving him with the disorienting sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. Other is about carrying multiple voices within a single body and still searching for one authentic voice.

The backdrop of 9/11 looms large in Stachel’s account. As a boy in California, he watched his father — darker-skinned, bearded, recognizably Middle Eastern — suddenly become a figure of suspicion. Overnight, his family’s presence was filtered through the fear and mistrust that saturated America after the attacks. For Stachel, it was a formative trauma. He recounts how he began distancing himself from his father’s appearance and heritage, denying or reshaping parts of his identity in order to escape the judgments of others. What might have been a simple story of a mixed-heritage Jewish boyhood became a painful initiation into the politics of race, religion, and suspicion in post-9/11 America.

The performance is brutally honest. Stachel doesn’t just tell stories; he embodies dozens of characters — parents, teachers, classmates, inner demons — giving voice to the forces that shaped him. Critics who saw the earlier Out of Character noted how he performed more than 40 roles over the course of the evening, slipping between them with humor and intensity. At the center of it all is his anxiety, personified on stage as a relentless voice; a tormentor who exposes his insecurities and self-doubt. Even the physicality of the performance matters: at times, Stachel literally sweats under the strain, his body underscoring the emotional labor of wrestling with self-hood in public.

What makes Other so compelling is how it resists flattening. Stachel could have chosen to present a neat identity that pleased everyone. He could have leaned into his Ashkenazi heritage in Jewish spaces, downplayed his father’s Arab and Yemeni roots in the broader culture, or passed as Black when it fit. Instead, he embraces contradiction. He admits to the pain of passing, to the shame of dissembling, to the exhaustion of being welcomed everywhere but rooted nowhere. His honesty is not tidy, but it is deeply human and it is precisely what gives the play its moral force.

For Jews, Other carries special resonance. Too often, American Jewish life is imagined narrowly, as if it were monochrome and monolithic. In reality, it encompasses Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi heritages, as well as countless blends created by Diaspora and intermarriage. Stachel’s story insists that Jewish identity is wide, textured, and complex. By putting a Yemeni-Ashkenazi household on stage, he gives voice to Jews of color and Jews of mixed heritage who have too often felt peripheral in communal narratives. Other says clearly: you belong.

But Other is not just a Jewish story. It is also an Arab story, a Middle Eastern story, a Black story, and an American story. It is about what it means to be welcomed conditionally, mistrusted reflexively, and asked to define yourself in ways that never quite fit. For Arabs and Middle Eastern Americans, it is rare representation that does not reduce or stereotype. For Black Americans, it echoes the struggle of reconciling self-knowledge with the perceptions imposed by others. And for every young American navigating multiple expectations — between family and school, tradition and modernity, online and offline — it is a reminder that identity is not a slogan but a journey.

The play also speaks to our cultural moment. Cancel culture and digital performance have created an environment where young people feel pressure to present a polished, singular self for approval. Nuance is suspect. Ambiguity is punished. Doubt is treated as weakness. Other resists that world. It demonstrates that wholeness comes not from clarity but from wrestling — not from erasing contradictions, but from inhabiting them.

That is why Other deserves more than applause from Jewish audiences. It deserves to be seen as a work that speaks to all Americans, and especially to the rising generation. It shows that identity is not fixed but fluid, that belonging is never simple, and that authenticity often comes through tension rather than resolution. These are lessons our fractured culture badly needs.

Great theatre does not just entertain; it enlarges our sympathies. It forces us to see ourselves in another’s story and to carry that recognition out of the theatre and back into the world. Stachel’s Other does exactly that. It challenges Jews to expand our sense of who belongs. It challenges Americans to reconsider the categories we use to define one another. And it challenges young people to resist the temptations of performance and to find their authentic voice in the midst of contradiction.

In Jewish tradition, we often return to the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. It is a story of struggle without resolution, of wounds that endure, but also of blessings that come only through the fight. Stachel’s play is a modern wrestling. It is a man confronting his many “others,” refusing easy answers, and choosing to tell the truth of his fractured self. That is why it is Jewish. That is why it is universal. And that is why every young American should see it.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.