The best storytellers invariably are those who are delighted by the stories they’re telling.
This is certainly the case in Farmers Alley’s one-woman show “Becoming Dr. Ruth,” in which the 20th Century’s preeminent sex therapist and public personality tells a chronological narrative about how she came to be.
Okay, so it’s not the 94 year old herself doing a biographical cabaret show. But you’d be hard pressed to distinguish actor Diane Wasnak from the vivacious, jovial, matronly yet childlike, smart, impish woman you think of as Dr. Ruth.
The show opens in Dr. Ruth’s New York City apartment in 1997. Recently widowed, she’s packing up her life as she’s known it, and as she comes across photos and tchotchkes amid the floor-to-ceiling white boxes, she delves into the memories they evoke, and in so doing she crafts the story of her life.
From her origins as an only child in an Orthodox family in Germany before the rise of Hitler, to being sent away to Switzerland never to be reunited with her beloved parents and grandmother, to being a sharp shooter and messenger for an underground Zionist army by night and a kindergarten teacher by day in Palestine, to Paris and New York, through three marriages and raising two children, mastering four languages and following a deep curiosity and internal desire to heal, it’s a fascinating tale made all the more delightful by a highly performative storyteller who seems the most delighted of all by the life she’s led.
At times the writing meanders into preciousness and cliché, the sweet little old lady who makes fun of her own shortness and accent, who knows deep sadness and therefore prefers to look at the bright side of life and not dwell too much on darkness. But the Holocaust is always looming, her resilience resonant. She is haunted by the past, but motivated rather than destroyed by it.
And the show, which premiered in 2013 and is written by Mark St. Germain, is a wonderful vehicle to explore and remember Jewish history, especially the rich traditions and culture that gave birth to such a phenomenally influential figure such as Dr. Ruth. “In the Hebrew tradition, sex is never shameful,” she says. Instead, it is a celebration of love. And sharing that attitude is her way of “repairing the world,” a kind of joyful karmic debt for having survived when so many did not.
But as fascinating as her story is, it’s the way Diane Wasnak embodies her more than anything that makes this show worthwhile. Wasnak has worked on stage and in film for decades—as a clown and a stunt double as well as in Cirque du Soleil among many other roles. And she brings that wealth of experience to create a surprisingly physical performance of this elderly woman who moves around a small space while simultaneously creating vivid worlds of imagination, memory, and history, with only the audience and pre-recorded radio show callers to play off.
Director Kathy Mulay’s vision transforms the black box space of Farmers Alley Theatre well beyond that singular apartment with the help of terrific technical design, including Christopher Mahlmann’s projections (original design by Brian Prather and Daniel Brodie), Cory Kalkowski’s lights, and Savannah Draper’s props, which all help successfully create tremendous shifts in time, space, and emotion.
There’s surprisingly little sex in this largely comedic show about the world’s most famous sex therapist, but there’s a whole lot of Dr. Ruth and all the ways and reasons why the 4’ 7” grandmother who sounds like Sigmund Freud is the figure to whom Americans in the 1980s wanted to open up about sex.
Becoming Dr. Ruth
Farmers Alley Theatre
March 10-19
https://www.farmersalleytheatre.com/shows/2022-23/becoming-dr-ruth
