New Play About Dr. Ruth Westheimer WHEN Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex therapist, met Sigmund Freud on a fateful night in midtown Manhattan, she probably should have known what might happen nine months later. The encounter took place last fall at the New World Stages theater complex, where Dr. Westheimer had just seen "Freud's Last Session," the word-of-mouth Off Broadway hit by Mark St. Germain. Afterward she found herself chatting with Martin Rayner, the actor who plays Freud. "He asked if he could come see me in my office," Dr. Westheimer recalled recently. I thought maybe he had a problem. Instead Mr. Rayner wanted to hear more about her spectacularly eventful life, which included losing both her parents in the Holocaust, training as a Haganah sniper in pre-independence Palestine, studying with the eminent psychologist Jean Piaget in Paris, marrying three husbands and raising two children - all before reinventing herself as America's favorite frank-talking voice of sexual reason. And now, thanks in part to Mr. Rayner, she is also the subject of Mr. St. Germain's newest play, "Dr. Ruth, All the Way," a one-woman show starring Debra Jo Rupp that has its world premiere next Saturday at Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires. "Ruth calls Freud the midwife of the show," Mr. St. Germain said. Being the real Dr. Ruth - "a cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse," as a journalist once put it - is an unusually demanding role. And during a conversation with Mr. St. Germain and Ms. Rupp two weeks into rehearsals, Dr. Westheimer, 84, was playing herself to the hilt at her three-bedroom apartment near the northern tip of Manhattan: urging cookies on her guests, passing out key chains hawking "Sex for Dummies" (one of her 36 books), fielding constant phone calls and generally battling against the threat of dead air. "You can tell who's directing this interview," Mr. St. Germain said after Dr. Westheimer interrupted him (apologetically) to display an award she received recently from the Yale School of Medicine. But when it came to the play, he said, she was respectful of boundaries. "It's been a great partnership," he said. All the opinions she's had have been about factual events, dates. Early on, he said, she told him, "I know what I don't know," and left the theater to the professionals. "Dr. Ruth, All the Way" takes place a few weeks after the death of her husband, Fred Westheimer, in 1997, as she packs up her mountainously cluttered apartment and recounts her life story. Though her real-life apartment was cleaned up last year by the television decorator Nate Berkus, it remains what a set designer might call prop-heavy, with photographs and memorabilia on nearly every surface and several elaborate dollhouses where Dr. Westheimer likes to "mooch around," she said. In one room a tiny Dr. Freud sits in an armchair. A pink cashmere pillow emblazoned with the word "Love" rests on the sofa, but there is nothing obviously sex related on view. Sex also takes something of a back seat in Mr. St. Germain's script, which he wrote with Ms. Rupp (a friend and veteran stage and television actor) in mind. Dr. Ruth is "responding to sexual situations throughout," he said, "but if that's all the play was about, it wouldn't be a play." Julianne Boyd, the artistic director of Barrington Stage, was skeptical when he first pitched the idea, though their professional relationship goes way back. "Dr. Ruth, All the Way" is the sixth of Mr. St. Germain's plays to have its premiere with the company and the first to be staged in a new auditorium named after him. But when Ms. Boyd learned more about Dr. Westheimer's life, she was sold. "Her indomitable spirit just caught me," she said. I thought this was a story that had to be told. I wanted to do it while she was still alive. And we had the perfect Dr. Ruth. Ms. Rupp, best known for her eight-year TV stint as Kitty Forman, the screwball suburban mother on "That 70s Show," said the surface outlines of the character came easily. "We both have high energy, and we both walk the same way," she said, adding, "When you're short, you march." (Ms. Rupp is 5 foot 2. Dr. Westheimer is 4 foot 7 and, she insisted, "not shrinking.") To perfect Dr. Westheimer's signature German-French-Hebrew accent, Ms. Rupp worked with the top voice coach Stephen Gabis. "You should hear her say "Terrific"!" Dr. Westheimer interjected, topping her richly guttural r's with some extra schlag. But Ms. Rupp was also wary of getting hemmed in by the famous voice. "At first I was worried that people would just want me to do a rich little imitation," she said. I can't live and breathe the person then. It has to come from me and my heart and who I think she is. Over several lunches and many follow-up calls she asked Dr. Westheimer about her two earlier marriages, and which of her two children - unseen presences on the telephone throughout the play - "pressed her buttons more." In rehearsals Ms. Rupp and Ms. Boyd also worked to bring out the silences of a woman who never seems to stop talking. When can the audience just stand back and watch her be? Ms. Rupp said. That's what we're trying to find and shape. Most of Mr. St. Germain's plays involve historical characters with starkly clashing world views, like the Christian C. S. Lewis and the atheist Freud in "Freud's Last Session," or the Klansman and the African-American activist in "The Best of Enemies," which ran at Barrington Stage last summer. "Dr. Ruth, All the Way," the first commission in the company's New Works Initiative, involved managing the subtler clash between sadness and humor, he said. "It turned out to be like spinning plates," he said. You wanted the story to come out, but you wanted humor to keep the audience involved. Dr. Westheimer, a passionate theatergoer who said she has seen "Phantom of the Opera" more than 20 times, has yet to watch Ms. Rupp's incarnation of her, though she calls two or three times a day to check in. "I love it!" she exclaimed, clapping her hands together. Who would have thought there would be a play about me? And when she does see the play, she plans to nick a souvenir from the set, just as she did from each season of her cable television show. "We already have our stage manager prepared that something will disappear," Mr. St. Germain said, adding, "I think I know what Ruth will want." The Stehaufmaennchen! Ms. Rupp exclaimed in her best Dr. Ruth voice, referring to a doll that pops back up every time it's knocked over. "Very good," Dr. Westheimer said of Ms. Rupp's pronunciation, before getting down to the hard sell. Whoever doesn't come to see Debra, don't forget: I was a sniper in the Haganah. I can still put five bullets in a circle and throw a hand grenade. She turned to Mr. St. Germain. Now they will all come.