Most people are familiar with Ruth Westheimer, but few know her backstory — her roots as a German child who fled her homeland to Switzerland as the Nazis were gaining power. After World War II, she emigrated to Palestine and took up arms as a sniper for the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary troupe. Ultimately, she moved again to the United States and became the world-renowned, outspoken radio and television sex therapist.
Her personal evolution is the subject of Becoming Dr. Ruth, a one-woman show by Mark St. Germain that inaugurates the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s new 199-seat second performance space, opening this Friday evening, Oct. 11 (after being postponed by Hurricane Milton). Featured as Westheimer will be Naomi Jacobson, a much-awarded stage actress from Washington, D.C., where this production began.
The play takes place late in Westheimer’s life, as she prepares to move from Washington to New York, following the death of her third husband.
“So she’s packing up her apartment, couches and chairs, books and shelves, she’s got to get the apartment packed up by the end of the play,” says Jacobson. “And we thought, wouldn’t it be more interesting to have it be an emotional journey, that I’m unpacking my life. I’m unpacking memories. So at the end of the play, my whole life is spread out in front of me. I’ve unpacked all the memories. So nothing is arbitrary, all the memories are intentional.”
Westheimer, who died in July at the age of 96, was a diminutive 4 foot-7 inches, about a foot less than Jacobson, which creates an illusion challenge. “What’s great about our production is there’s no set. So you don’t have to compare my size, my height, to a chair or a couch or something. This is the only time I can say this, I was too tall and too young for the role,” she says with a laugh.
Jacobson was performing the show in Cleveland — one of three cities where she has appeared as Dr. Ruth, along with Washington, D.C., and Seattle — when the offer to bring it to South Florida arose unexpectedly. “I had no idea that (Jupiter theater namesake) Milton Maltz is from Cleveland, on the board of the Clevland Playhouse. He saw the show and the next thing I knew I was being invited to a dinner with him and Andrew (Kato, the Maltz Jupiter’s producing artistic director) and a couple of the board members, asking me if I would be interested in bringing it to Florida. Of course I said yes. So I’ve been committed to coming here for the past year.”
During the Cleveland engagement of the show, Jacobson got to meet Westheimer. “She came to see the show, saying she would sit way in the back, so I wouldn’t see her and she wouldn’t distract me.
“I did know she was there,” recalls Jacobson. “They told me, but I was glad I couldn’t see her. She told my husband afterwards that I was ‘faboolus.’
“She has an accent that no one else has,” Jacobson notes. To become Dr. Ruth, “I listened to hours of her, her radio show, her television show, whatever I could find. I read almost all of her books, which was no easy task. And I still listen to her in the dressing room. There’s no other dialect like it, but I didn‘t feel like I needed to do an imitation. I just wanted to channel her essence. And her essence is she is such a force of nature. She greets the world with such wonder and curiosity and chutzpah — although she wouldn’t use that word, it’s not a German word — and a sense of adventure and a sense of optimism.
“She’s very childlike. Which is extraordinary considering what she’d gone through. And I thought, ‘If she could keep that after what she went through, none of us have anything to complain about.’ She just kept bulldozing forward with a kind of joy. We learned from her that we can overcome any obstacle thrown our way with the right attitude. I really started to look at my life and said, ‘Find the joy, find the optimism.’
“After I met her and talked to her, I was able to incorporate a little bit more of her in my performance. She’s very focused. Like she knows she’s famous and that everyone’s looking at her. And when she looks at you, there’s nobody else around.”
Westheimer’s career as a frank-talking sex therapist happened largely by accident. “She went into this because she really felt there was an issue that needed solving, It wasn’t about becoming famous and it wasn’t about talking about sex,” explains Jacobson. “It was a deep need of the women in Harlem who were having abortions left and right, they knew nothing about birth control. She felt that somebody needed to educate them about what their options are. She wanted to give people control of their lives. Sex is so basic, yet we don’t talk about it. It’s the reason we’re here, she says, literally. It was what was needed. It had nothing to do with her ego. By the time she was famous, she was 60 and sort of a dumpy grandma. A very unlikely celebrity.”
Jacobson has dozens of productions to her credit, but Becoming Dr. Ruth is her first one-person play, a genre she does not particularly like. “Why am I telling this story to you tonight? Holly (Twyford, the show’s director) and I spent a lot of time with that. Because if there’s not a reason, there’s no point. And there usually isn’t.
“What we’ve come up with now is that in this moment, as I say, ‘there’s something restless within me, a lot of turmoil.’ Every time she’s moved before was either that her life became untenable, or there’s something better over there and I’m going to go towards something. And this one time, she’s running away from something. And so that energy in her is not settled.
“She doesn’t like being alone, so she’s starting to spiral on her own. And the audience becomes her salvation. ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. Thank God. So let me tell you what’s going on.’ I hope that comes through, as I turn to the audience for their help. And as I unpack and show the audience who I am, and how I became who I am, I begin to settle in myself so I can grieve. I haven’t grieved yet for my husband. So there’s a part of me that’s running away from grief. And having lived with him for 36 years in this house, the triggers for grief are everywhere.”
No matter how much you know about Westheimer, Jacobson feels you will enjoy her theatrical journey of Becoming Dr. Ruth. “Because it’s a very inspiring story about overcoming hardship with joy and optimism. It’s about realizing that your circumstances don’t dictate your behavior or your response. That you are in control of pretty much your whole life and how it’s going to play out,” she says. “Her story is so extreme, what she became and what she overcame is so inspiring, and it’s really, really funny. It’s very inspiring, it’s profound and it’s also funny.”
BECOMING DR. RUTH, Maltz Jupiter Theatre Island Theatre, 1001 Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Friday, Oct. 11–Sunday, Oct 20. $65. 561-575-2223.