Dr Ruth Westheimer had her first late-night radio show, “Sexually Speaking”, in 1980.
It was pre-recorded and ran for 15 minutes on the NBC station WYNY-FM in New York and proved so popular that it grew into an hour-long live call-in. By the mid-1980s, she was on American TV with shows such as “Good Sex! With Dr Ruth Westheimer” and “Ask Dr Ruth”.
In Mark St Germain’s warm homage to the talk-show host who transformed how sex is discussed in public, the 4ft 7in sex therapist – who was born Karola Ruth Siegel in Frankfurt in Germany in 1928 and died in her Upper Manhattan home in New York City in 2024 – is played by Anne O’Sullivan, a similarly small, but punchy, Irish immigrant to NYC.
The action is set in the living room of Dr Ruth’s Washington Heights apartment, which features her comfy settee, the obligatory menorah and framed black-and-white and coloured photos of multiple generations of her beloved (and lost) family members.
Punctuated by informal phonecalls with, variously, her children, the owner of a recalcitrant penis and a Holocaust survivor, she takes the audience through her life in a chatty, matter-of fact manner that belies its magnitude. It’s a bit like a potted philosemitic version of Jewish history of the 20th century.
An only child raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, who learnt about sex at ten via a hidden book in her parents’ bedroom, she recalls – with the aid of a backstage screen – the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, Kristallnacht (the anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany and Austria in 1938), her escape to Switzerland on the kindertransport and her involvement in the Haganah (Jewish underground resistance) after immigrating to British-controlled Palestine in the mid-1940s. Phew!
And that’s before the first of three husbands rolled up, and a period in Paris where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne. It’s a lot to fit in before Dr Ruth found fame in her fifties.
O’Sullivan, 74, sporting a blonde-coloured curly-haired wig and a flowery shirt with dark-coloured slacks, looks uncannily like the good doctor – who was not actually a doctor at all, but received a doctor of education professional practice degree from Columbia University in New York and had a private sex therapy clinic.
Portraying a naturalised American with a German-Jewish accent and a flicker of French is no easy feat and her voice does come across as a tad hammy; but O’Sullivan conveys Dr Ruth’s unabashed nature and garrulousness with seeming ease in Stephen Nachamie’s affectionate production.
Becoming Dr Ruth
Assembly @ St Andrew Square: Front room
Until August 30 (Not Aug 17)
