Review: BECOMING DR. RUTH: A TIMELY TALE OF COURAGE AND HOPE at The Phoenix Theatre Company

Given a playwright's easy access to the Internet, you'd assume writing a story about historical figures should be a proverbial walk in the park. It's a trivial misconception, of course, for it takes an artist's imagination to steer the intellectual rigor that one needs to conduct research.

Mark St. Germain is accustomed to such painstaking work, having probed and reimagined the lives of Sigmund Freud, C.S. Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. His body of work is characterized by an encyclopedic scrutiny that makes for a credible stage docudrama, but most noteworthy is the playwright's facility for humanizing a character from the bland pages of history.

In BECOMING DR. RUTH, St. Germain has crafted a poignant one-woman show, now playing with agreeable warmth and veracity at The Phoenix Theatre Company. It's a stark account of Karola Ruth Siegel, whose would-be celebrity status belies her tragic beginnings. (It's a rare boon to the playwright to have a subject who still lives to affirm the project; Dr. Ruth is in her nineties.)

The world has come to know her as Dr. Ruth Westheimer, America's darling grandmother who gave us decades of candid advice on matters of sex and sexuality. She was a unique voice on the airwaves and wrote dozens of bestselling books on the topic.

The title alone might lead some viewers to infer a stage iteration of a familiar subject, but Mr. St. Germain is smart enough to keep that discussion to its bare minimum: a perfunctory rehash of the doctor's greatest hits on talk radio and a few allusions to a fortuitous TV career that made her a star to reckon with.

The play aims to highlight the journey of a Jewish girl in Nazi Germany, who at ten years of age lost her family to the Holocaust while she took refuge in a Swiss orphanage. At age 17, young Karola emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, subsequently joining the Haganah (a Zionist paramilitary organization) where she trained as a sniper and a scout (she would joke that being short was her greatest asset then). In 1948, she was wounded in action, which left her incapacitated for several months. She changed her first name to Ruth, but kept the letter K as a middle initial so that she might be recognized in case any of her family members survived the Holocaust.

It's not your run-of-the-mill narrative about a harmless, diminutive orphaned girl, given the way she sets her own terms to create a fierce existence. She moved to Paris in 1950 to study and teach psychology, later immigrating to the United States to become a naturalized citizen and where she pursued advanced studies in sociology (she'd always known education was her way out of hardship).

While living in New York City, Westheimer's work with Planned Parenthood inspired her to study human sexuality, which parlayed into a profession that made her a leading voice on the topic of contraception and teenage pregnancy. It spawned a radio pilot titled Sexually Speaking, an unlikely start to a media career that would make her a household name.

The Phoenix Theatre Company's production is buttressed by a solid technical crew. It's cohesive enough to support the herculean effort of Ms. Debra K. Stevens, who wields an impressive command of a voluminous text while practically staging a tutorial on how storytelling ought to be paced. She gives us a Dr. Ruth who is warm, funny, and authentic. This is a critical piece in portraying an oft-caricatured personality known for dishing unvarnished commentaries on people's erogenous zones.

In this genre, it's easy for lesser actors to fall into mimicry, but in her partnership with Ms. Stevens, director Katie McFadzen has set the appropriate temperature to keep Dr. Ruth brazen but honest, striking a fine balance between humor and outrage. Ms. Stevens achieves this nuance even as she reminisces about the most tender moments of her childhood and the heartbreaking loss of her parents and grandmother.

St. Germain sets the play in the early summer of 1997 in Dr. Ruth's living room (a wholesome interior set by Douglas Clarke). Cloaked in the pretext of packing her belongings as she prepares to move out of her apartment, Dr. Ruth Westheimer enters with a phone to her ear (she's often interrupted by a phone call) and almost immediately acknowledges the audience (yes, she breaks the fourth wall), whom she regales with anecdotes and memories from a rich life that spans across decades and continents. She'd adopted the surname from her recently deceased third husband, Fred Westheimer (her true love). She has two adult children, Miriam and Joel, and four grandchildren.

A 4-foot-7-inch dynamo and a loquacious polyglot, Dr. Ruth steps on a box to reach for a book or a scrapbook that reveals prized photographs (simultaneously projected on multiple screens) and unearths a treasure trove of memories. With Nathaniel White's lighting and Marie Quinn's sound design, we are moved to accept Ms. Steven's invitation to places of boundless significance. Dr. Ruth speaks of her grandmother like a soulmate and recalls her father's kindness and strength as a foundation for her grounded disposition. After the Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass), when her father was taken away by the Nazis, we can't help but acknowledge her suppressed grief as she waves goodbye to her mother and grandmother on her way to the orphanage, forcing a smile to keep them from breaking apart.

At a time when antisemitism makes a creepy return to our national consciousness, BECOMING DR. RUTH is an apt reminder of a past that deserves no legitimacy in shaping any public policy. As Dr. Ruth Westheimer has learned, we are stronger in diversity and united by our common regard for familial roots. Family, in fact, is the link that binds this epic tale. If any lesson is to be gained from Dr. Ruth, it's the message to continue the fight against injustice and to hold those we love close to our hearts.

If any of that sounds maudlin, keep her abiding creed in mind: "A lesson learned in humor is a lesson remembered."

Photo Credit: Reg Madison Photography

BECOMING DR. RUTH runs through June 27.

For tickets, contact The Phoenix Theatre Company

www.phoenixtheatre.com ~ 1825 > Central Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85004 ~ (602) 254-2151

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