If you don’t know who Dr. Ruth is, you probably weren’t listening to the radio or watching American TV in the 1980s. Here’s your chance to meet the diminutive gnome with the distinctive accent and enlightened attitudes about sex that led her to say things like “Skiing is like good sex: all about instincts, timing and taking risks.”
Dr. Ruth Westheimer, sex therapist extraordinaire, was a fixture in those pre-Internet days, dispensing humorous, no-nonsense advice to the lovelorn and sexually confused.
Playwright Mark St. Germain, who has penned theatrical profiles of other famous people such as Typhoid Mary, Thomas Edison and Tammy Wynette, lets Dr. Ruth tell her own dramatic story.
It’s more than dramatic; harrowing might be a better description. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, she was orphaned at 10 by the Holocaust and sent to a boarding school in Switzerland, where she became a maid. She never saw her family again.
After the war, she went to Palestine where, she says, “I was a servant again, this time on a Jewish kibbutz.” But she got a scholarship to study in Jerusalem, where she got a certificate as a kindergarten teacher. She met a soldier and they moved to Paris, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne.
In 1956, they emigrated to New York City and settled in Manhattan, where Ruth scored a scholarship to the New School, graduated with a master’s degree in sociology and went to work as a research assistant at Columbia University.
She eventually got a Ph.D. from Columbia, but though attracted to a scholar’s life, she found her niche when a lecture she gave to New York broadcasters about the need for sex education programming led to an offer for a 15-minute radio show every Sunday. It was an immediate success, “Sexually Speaking” was lengthened to an hour and by 1984 Dr. Ruth was syndicated nationally.
Now North Coast Repertory Theatre offers a delightful streamed version of “Becoming Dr. Ruth” through July 4. Ellenstein was smart enough to offer Tovah Feldshuh the role, and we are lucky that she accepted.
Feldshuh may not be 4’7” tall (she’s not much taller, at 5’3”), but she is perfect for the part – she has the accent, the attitude and the movements down. And the fact that she counts Dr. Ruth a friend (so when questions arose in rehearsal they could just call the authority) didn’t hurt.
Kudos to North Coast’s resident set designer Marty Burnett and Elisa Benzoni for the just-right set and costumes, and to Aaron Rumley, who made the tech (cinematography, editing, projections and sound design) look easy.
The world is lucky that Dr. Ruth (at a sprightly 93) is still with us. And now you can see her again through July 4, thanks to the magic of technology. Don’t pass up the chance. Get a ticket at northcoastrep.org.
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