Based on a true story.

1952: Stan Glickman is a promising young artist student in Paris, living the life of his dreams. He’s fallen in love and has won a prestigious competition with a show at the Met. But a chance encounter with an American tourist catapults him into one of the darkest chapters of the Cold War—the CIA’s quest for a mind control drug.

After an evening of heated political debate in a Paris café, Stan’s new companion offers to buy him a drink. Stan Glickman accepts—and immediately spirals into a mysterious mental breakdown. His life is shattered; he never paints again. 25 years later, he discovers why: The tourist was a government operative, and the drink he bought Stan was laced with LSD. By then, Stan can’t remember much about the man in the café—except that he walked with a limp. Armed with that clue, Stan embarks on a years-long effort to track down the stranger and force him out of the shadows. But The Other American is about much more than one man’s quest for justice and accountability. It is about the high human price we pay when we allow our government to reduce our fellow Americans—any American–to some expendable “other.”
The action of the play moves between Paris, circa 1952, and the late 1980s in New York.