This is an IHeart podcast.

Family Secrets is a production of IHeart Radio.

My name is Ariel Netanel, Statue, Yeshua.

For my whole life, I've battled the truth.

I'm Middle Eastern.

My roots are in Yemen.

I was scared that if anyone found out that I was less valid of a person,

but I'm so sorry to have lied to everybody in this room.

That's Ari Statchell, Tony Award-winning actor, singer, and playwright.

His one-man show, Other, is currently running off-Broadway.

Aris is a story of all the ways our identities,

the way we see ourselves, the way others see us, have a profound

impact on the shape of our lives and the stories we tell.

I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,

the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

Ari, tell me about the landscape of your childhood in Berkeley, California.

The landscape of my childhood.

Well, the first thing I'll say is that at one and a half, my parents divorced.

And so I was raised between the household of Yemenite Israeli father and an Ashkenazi American doctor.

And they both had very different ways of thinking and engaging with the world.

My dad had moved with nothing but ambition and no sort of higher education beyond high school.

And he was a taxi driver when he first moved to the Bay Area in San Francisco.

...