“She had no inhibitions,” Mark St. Germain says of Dr. Ruth Westheimer. He should know; he wrote “Becoming Dr. Ruth” after many conversations with the renowned sexologist. The play will be at Shadowland Stages in Ellenville September 19 through October 5.
Dr. Ruth lived at least five lives: a child in Nazi Germany, a youth in England, a sniper in Israel, an immigrant in the US, a world-famous sex expert. Of her frank sexual advice, she said: “I can get away with it because I sound like a combination of your grandmother and Sigmund Freud.” The puritanical American mind, it turns out, could only be assuaged by a German-accented, diminutive doctor in her 50s.
Born Karola Ruth Siegel in Wiesenfeld, Germany, in 1928, she left Germany on the Kindertransport when she was 10 years old, part of a massive evacuation bringing children under Nazi rule to Great Britain. She never saw her family again; they all perished in the Holocaust. At the age of 17, Dr. Ruth emigrated to Israel, where she joined the radical Haganah and trained as a sharpshooter. She was wounded by an exploding shell in the Palestine War of 1947-1949, and almost lost both feet. She came to the US in 1956.
Dr. Ruth had the entrepreneurial talent to find a niche that was unfilled in the United States—though her doctorate was in education, not human sexuality or psychology. She came to prominence in the 1980s with the radio call-in show “Sexually Speaking,” which originated out of WYNY in New York City and quickly drew a national following. When you’ve looked death in the face, human sexuality is not so frightening.
As a result, Dr. Ruth became an `80s celebrity, like Lionel Richie and Rodney Dangerfield.
St. Germain, a resident of Great Barrington, Massachsusetts, has written plays on a number of historical figures: Eleanor Roosevelt, Typhoid Mary, and Homer and Langley Collyer (perhaps the world’s most famous hoarders).
This play grew organically out of a previous work, “Freud’s Last Session.” (That play was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud in 2023.) Dr. Ruth loved “Freud’s Last Session” when it played off Broadway in 2010, and saw it three times. Backstage, she spoke to the actor who played Freud, Martin Rayner. After hearing her story, Rayner encouraged St. Germain to write a play about the celebrated sex therapist. At first Dr. Ruth discouraged him, so the playwright called her and left a message: “I would never do anything without your participation, so don’t worry about it.” Soon afterwards, he received a message from Dr. Ruth: “Come for coffee tomorrow, 9 o’clock.”
The next morning, after they began speaking, the doctor brought out a pile of books she’d written. “Does this mean we’re doing the play?” St. Germain asked.
“Oh, yes,” Dr. Ruth casually replied.
The playwright read two autobiographies, All in a Lifetime and Musically Speaking: A Life Through Song, and consulted with Dr. Ruth about factual details. “So I finished the play, and I brought it to her house,” St. Germain recounts, “and we were sitting in her kitchen, and she said, ‘Okay, read it to me.’”
“I said, ’I’m not an actor. I’ll bring in an actress.’ ‘No, you read it.’”
He read the entire script, and she made two small corrections, then gave the work her blessing.
This one-woman play is set in Dr. Ruth’s apartment in the German-Jewish enclave of Washington Heights. It’s structured as an intimate monologue with Dr. Ruth packing up belongings and reminiscing about formative moments in her personal and professional life. It’s warm, humorous, and poignant—balancing Dr. Ruth’s trademark frankness about sexuality with deeply moving reflections on resilience and loss. The Shadowland Stages production stars Anne O’Sullivan as Dr. Ruth and is directed by Stephen Nachamie.
“Becoming Dr. Ruth” premiered at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 2012, and has been revived many times since.
St. Germain and Dr. Ruth remained friends; he saw her a few days before she died, last year.
This article appears in September 2025.
