Few people are unfamiliar with Ruth Westheimer, the straight-talking grandmotherly sex therapist of radio, television, books and even a sex education board game. Perhaps even fewer, however, are aware of her back story, how this plucky German girl fled from the Nazis to Switzerland, eventually emigrating to America by way of Palestine and then becoming an unlikely media celebrity dubbed Dr. Ruth.
That emotional and geographic journey is chronicled by Mark St. Germain (Freud’s Last Session, Camping With Henry and Tom) in a one-person play, Becoming Dr. Ruth, now inaugurating the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s cozy 198-seat Island Theatre. Embodying the diminutive, yet larger-than-life character is Naomi Jacobson, who skillfully navigates the disjointed 80-minute evening, bouncing about the box-cluttered stage spouting winsome comic anecdotes and touching dramatic recollections.
The actress is enormously convincing as Westheimer without attempting an impersonation. She manages to be compelling, even when the material exhibits the usual artificial qualities of solo shows. Becoming Dr. Ruth is undeniably entertaining, but wasn’t this long-awaited performance space intended for more experimental fare or new material?
When we first see Westheimer, she is chatting on the telephone, the first of several one-way conversations on which we will eavesdrop. Then she turns towards the audience, taken aback that we happen to be in her New York apartment, just as she is packing it up in preparation for a move across town. But since we are there, she figures she might as well regale us with her life story. Much of her history is conveyed chronologically, though Jacobson frequently opens her boxes of possessions to find dioramas from her past, vintage photographs and assorted artifacts that prompt digressions.
We hear how she came into the world as Karola Ruth Siegel, the daughter of German Jews who send her off alone at 10 on the so-called Kindertransport to avoid Hitler’s wrath, never to see her family again. Following the war, teenage Karola relocates to Palestine, becoming a sniper for the Haganah, the Jewish underground army, sustaining injuries in a bombing raid during that nation’s war for independence.
Still, little slows the peripatetic young woman who travels to Paris and then New York, taking on a series of teaching position before assuming her true calling as Dr. Ruth, the outspoken advocate for guilt-free sex on a radio call-in show, first locally and then broadcast nationally.
Along the way, she somehow has time for three husbands. Two of the marriages end in divorce, but the play is sketchy on the reasons for their demise. Marriage number three, to Fred Westheimer, lasts 36 years until his death, which prompts her impulse to change apartments.
The scenic design by Paige Hathaway consists entirely of white boxes, precariously stacked and a few floating on air. Because they are artfully abstract, they avoid serving as a measure of Jacobson’s height, allowing her the illusion of Westheimer’s 4-foot-7-inches. In any event, the actress climbs about the set with breathless abandon, as director Holly Twyford consciously avoids the potential for static staging.
Becoming Dr. Ruth covers Westheimer’s life and career with admirable attention to detail, even if we are left with a sense that it never really gets inside to her deeper feelings. Still, as the biographical genre goes, theatergoers are likely to leave this opening booking at The Island Theatre sufficiently satisfied.
BECOMING DR. RUTH, Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s Island Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Through Sunday, Oct. 20. $65. 561-575-2223.