Stacy Price has been at this for at least fifteen years. She trained at Circle in the Square in New York and did plays there. Then came Los Angeles, the Groundlings, and open mics around town. She is now a member of the Actors Gang, where Tim Robbins is artistic director. Her SAG-AFTRA card came from HBO’s The Deuce. She did not sit down one day and decide to write a one-person show.
Citizen Otherplace is that show, and it is about her own cancer. She plays roughly five characters in it, including the patient. One is her doctor. One is a medical debt collector who calls like an action-movie villain. The audience is checked into a hospital on arrival. At one point you are invited to throw fruit at a character called It. You do not yet know what It is. The show is a comedy hour about the American healthcare system. It is also, quite plainly, a survival story.
We caught up with Stacy to talk about Sontag, debt collectors and Andy Kaufman. We also covered what happens when the character transitions go wrong on stage.
Fifteen years of going home dissatisfied
She is precise about the gap between calling yourself a performer and being one. The work, as she describes it, happens after the show rather than during it.
It’s one thing to say you are something. It’s another thing to do it, go home, and think — ah, that could have been better.
The questions she keeps returning to are simple ones. What are you trying to say, and why are you doing this at all?
And the way I talk about hard things is comedy. That’s the only way I think you can talk about it.
That is not a preference so much as a working method. It is also the reason this particular subject became an hour of jokes.
The audition she was told she would not get
Her SAG-AFTRA card arrived by an unpromising route. Her manager had sent nothing for six months. She was working a survival job at the US Open, sitting in a booth in 101-degree heat. She remembers thinking, plainly, that this was her life now.
Then an audition landed for ten the next morning. She got home at midnight, and a friend came over to work the material. He told her flatly that she was wrong for it, and described who they actually wanted.
You’re not going to pick me, so let me just do it.
She was cast in The Deuce. She now treats that freedom as something to manufacture deliberately.
Five characters, all of them her
The show is about her, but she is playing about five people. Working on it, she realised they were all parts of herself. Her framing is that everyone you meet contains some aspect of you. The job is finding yourself inside the other person.
She is emphatic that she cannot simply be herself with a microphone. Give her a character and she can improvise freely. Ask her to walk on as Stacy Price and she struggles.
The character that is essentially myself in my show, the one closest to me — that’s the one that required the most work.
That is the paradox the whole hour sits on. The most demanding role she plays is the one requiring no costume at all.
Dr. Taha, and cruelty that is not cruelty
Dr. Taha is named after a middle school drama teacher. In practice she resembles Price’s father, who is a doctor. The character was built from the ground up, and everything else grew out of her.
The source is a real moment. Somebody looked at an ultrasound and asked, flatly, whether it had been there six months. Price was weeping in the chair.
She’s not cruel in a cognizant way. She’s cruel because she needs to work.
That distinction matters to the show. Dr. Taha is driven, passionate, and in and out of the room fast. She is, as Price puts it, exactly the doctor you want.
Mike, who calls like a villain
Another character is Mike, a medical debt collector. He is the whole collections industry compressed into one man. He calls constantly, and he is hunting the patient down.
Price borrows the structure from action films directly. The villain rings the hero to announce the building will explode. Here the same call arrives, aimed at someone trying to survive an illness.
The show is immersive from the moment you walk in. A character checks you into the hospital. Then a patient receives a diagnosis, and the room starts trying to get them treated. She describes it as protagonist versus system, and says she wishes it were not.
The darkest thing in the hour
Asked for the darkest material in the show, she does not hesitate. A surgery was coming up, and the phone rang. The caller wanted a thousand dollars immediately, before the operation.
Why? In case I die?
The logic being that money is harder to collect from the dead. She thinks it is the darkest thing in the show. She also thinks it is very funny, and both are true at once.
Even with insurance
The received wisdom is that the uninsured are the ones in trouble. Price says the genuinely disturbing part was watching it happen to insured people. She describes a system that had become a parody of itself. Tragedy strikes, and then a family opens a fundraiser.
It’s such an elephant in the room. The emperor doesn’t have clothes on.
Her position is that everyone can see it and everyone can feel it. What she is arguing for is systematic change rather than sympathy.
Explaining it to Scotland
She asked an adviser how much a Scottish audience would need explained. The answer was that people are clever and get it conceptually. So she asked what the nearest local equivalent was. The reply was veterinary care, and how animals are treated.
She notes the analogy has limits. Even the vet bills he quoted came nowhere near American figures.
The title, and the two passports
Citizen Otherplace takes its name from an idea of Susan Sontag’s. We all hold two passports, one for the kingdom of the well and one for the kingdom of the sick. Nobody wants to use the second. Everybody eventually does, even briefly.
Price’s point is that the sense of being other is false. She remembers masks and curtains and the feeling of total isolation. It is a deeply lonely experience that millions of people are having simultaneously.
When the transitions fail
Switching between five characters at speed is the technical problem of the show. She says she is still working out the fastest route between them. When the character’s want is clear, the switch cannot go wrong. When her brain is still adjusting, it can.
In a recent workshop she failed a transition outright. It got a laugh, and it worked so well the team wondered about keeping it.
It acknowledges the reality, which is that this is one person trying very hard to communicate five different identities.
That is an unusually honest thing to build into a show. It also means the seams are part of the design.
Fifty Shades, and other early mistakes
Before any of this she made a 50 Shades parody with friends. Everyone on the trip was reading the book obsessively, and it seemed ripe. None of them had shot anything before, which she offers as an informed apology.
It ran to eight episodes, and they improved across them. Her main technical discovery was that sound matters. Her main creative one was that the source was already parodying itself. Someone drawn to a person treating her badly struck her as dark and funny at once.
Idols, and the Kaufman question
Kristen Wiig’s work on SNL stuns her, for how rooted and specific it is. Then Meryl Streep, and Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine. Tim Robbins, for the prison project and the free outdoor festivals. Dustin Hoffman, whose films she rented from the library to study his technique. And Andy Kaufman with Christopher Lloyd in Taxi.
On Kaufman she is thoughtful rather than reverent. She reads him as a philosopher interested in what an audience actually is. What does it mean to be approved of, or laughed at, or walked out on? She is clear that she does not share the impulse. She wants the room to like this.
It’s not not caring — it’s just not giving it any weight.
That is her working definition of confidence. It is also, roughly, how she describes the appeal of playing anyone but herself.
When I’m the character, it’s just the character — and there’s something very freeing in that.
Which is a useful thing to have found. She is about to do it, alone, in front of strangers, every afternoon.
Price says she pushes towards the meek side as a person. What overrode that was having something she actually needed to say. Citizen Otherplace is built on a Sontag idea about two passports. Everyone eventually uses the second one, and nobody is other for holding it. She wants the huge pops of laughter as well. Both things are the point, and she does not rank them. A room that laughs at a debt collector has already understood the argument. That is the trick the show is running. The laugh and the argument arrive as the same object.
Citizen Otherplace plays the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 at 13:45. Written and performed by Stacy Price. Find it at citizenotherplace.com, or @citizenotherplaceshow.