“People don’t look at the elderly as sexual beings,” says Debra Jo Rupp as the title character in “Becoming Dr. Ruth,” a solo play about the celebrity sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer that opened on Tuesday at the Westside Theater. “Worse, some older people don’t see themselves that way.”
Nor, it appears, does the playwright Mark St. Germain (“Freud’s Last Session”), who assembled this talking Wikipedia page. He neuters the woman whose remarkable life it depicts, reducing her to an adorable bundle of innocuous jokes, sentimental clichés and over-explained metaphors. The Dr. Ruth onstage is a cartoon, a Stehaufmaennchen doll — you push her down and she bounces right back up!
No disrespect is intended to the real Dr. Westheimer, whose courage, resilience, humanity and intellect are much in evidence here, nor to the tremendous suffering she endured on the way to becoming the beloved matron who taught 1980s America not to be ashamed of sex. But such a fascinating subject deserves a less superficial bioplay than this one, whose lackluster writing is matched by Julianne Boyd’s pedestrian direction.
The setup is not unlike that of a far superior recent single-character play about another German-Jewish refugee who reinvented herself in America, “I’ll Eat You Last.” As indicated by the subtitle of that Bette Midler vehicle, “A Chat With Sue Mengers,” the protagonist welcomed the audience into her living room to gab, exposing her vulnerabilities while celebrating her triumphs.
Here, Dr. Ruth cuts short a phone call with her publicist when she looks up and realizes she has company. The time is 1997, two months after the death of her third husband, and she is packing up the Washington Heights apartment they shared, preparing to move the next day. With a stash of memorabilia, photographs and documents at the ready, Dr. Ruth shares her reminiscences.
Her story is certainly a stirring one. Born Karola Ruth Siegel in 1928, the diminutive girl saw her childhood in Frankfurt cut short when her father was taken to a labor camp soon after Kristallnacht in 1938. At 10, she was sent on a Kindertransport train to Switzerland, never to see her Orthodox family again.
When she was 17, she moved to a kibbutz in Palestine, and then to Jerusalem to study kindergarten teaching, just as the conflict between Jews and Arabs was escalating. She joined the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization, and became an ace sniper, receiving nearly fatal injuries in a bomb blast on her 20th birthday. Next stop was Paris, where she continued her studies and taught at the Sorbonne before traveling to America in 1956.
Mr. St. Germain connects the dots in a rudimentary fashion to explain how Dr. Westheimer found her way into sex therapy and became a popular media figure. The play, which comes to New York after being seen at the Barrington Stage Company and TheaterWorks in Hartford, provides no nuanced exploration of the Dr. Ruth phenomenon, instead simplifying her vocation into a survivor’s sense of obligation to repair the world. That sentiment might have been lifted from the subject’s own words, but it doesn’t make for an illuminating portrait.
Ms. Rupp, who is best known as the mom on “That ’70s Show,” gets close enough with the accent and does a nice job conveying the warmth and humor of Dr. Ruth. But rather than this well-meaning tribute, I kept wishing that the woman herself were onstage reflecting on her life and taking questions.
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