Act II Playhouse presents Mark St. Germain’s ‘Becoming Dr. Ruth’

I have no idea how I first became aware of Dr. Ruth — it’s like she was always there. Long before I was actually old enough to know why she was famous, I knew who the short, bespectacled lady with the funny accent was.

As I got older, I took for granted that being able to identify Dr. Ruth was enough. How wrong I was.

Dr. Ruth’s path to America

The one-woman play Becoming Dr. Ruth introduces us to the life of the eponymous sex therapist. Ruth (Drucie McDaniel) welcomes us into her home, which she is packing up ahead of her a planned move across Manhattan. Over an hour and a half, Ruth walks the audience through her biography, with several sidebars and distractions along the way.

The play covers a lot of ground, from Ruth’s birth in 1928 to the “present day” of the play, in 1997. We learn of Ruth’s childhood in Weimar Germany and the horror with which her family watched the rise of Nazism. While Ruth managed to escape to Switzerland via the kindertransport, the Nazis murdered her parents and grandmother, though Ruth isn’t sure exactly when or where. Their memories stay with her as she leaves Switzerland for Israel, then Paris, and then New York.

Rise to fame

Though notable, this aspect of Dr. Ruth’s biography isn’t unique to her. What really made her a cultural icon is what happened after she landed in America. The second half of the play focuses on Ruth’s life here: the births of her children, the dissolution of her second marriage and arc of her third, the path that led her to becoming a “doctor” (Westheimer holds an doctorate in education from Columbia University), and her rise to fame as a friendly and funny call-in talk-show host.

Ruth breaks up this potential linear tedium by moving into sidebar commentary and getting distracted by her packing. To ground us in the play’s setting — the day before she’s meant to move to another apartment — she also takes phone calls from her children, her publicist, and her mover. It’s just enough to keep the play from feeling like a recitation of a Wikipedia article.

A perfect performance

Fans of the arts in Philly might recognize McDaniel as the reader of Molly Bloom’s chapter every year at the Rosenbach Museum’s Bloomsday celebration, so they already know that she is a skilled, nuanced performer who excels at accents.

Dr. Ruth’s instantly recognizable accent (described in the play as “German-Israeli-French-American”) isn’t easy to emulate, but McDaniel does it handily. She plays Ruth with all of the warmth and charm those of us who grew up watching the diminutive doctor would expect. Dan O’Neil directs, but McDaniel’s performance feels so organic that it’s hard to tell how much of it is owed to her natural ability. Wig designer Christie Kelly and costume designer Janus Stefanowicz top things off, and McDaniel truly becomes Dr. Ruth.

It’s not easy carrying an entire show by yourself, but carry the show McDaniel does, and I never felt fatigue watching her or wished the show would hurry up and end.

McDaniel — and Act II — do the remarkable life of Dr. Ruth Westheimer justice in Becoming Dr. Ruth, and if you’re a city dweller, it’s worth a trek to the suburbs.