Dr. Ride’s American Beach House by Liza Berkenmeier (review)

Liza Berkenmeier’s dynamic new play, Dr. Ride’s American Beach House, presents an underrepresented history of how queer women carved out feminist space for themselves in the early 1980s, following the period of gay liberation. While LGBTQ+ theatre about that era primarily focuses on HIV/ AIDS and gay men, this production empathetically pushed the epidemic to the side, for just a moment, demonstrating how Sally Ride became an icon for lesbians, symbolizing aspirational hope at a time when queer women were just beginning to find their voices. With its quiet, intimate, and minimalist staging, director Katie Brook’s production showed how the origins of queer activist spaces often began with casual conversations at intimate gatherings before growing to movements that continue to advance inclusive, queerer spaces.

An intimate moment between Kristen Sieh (Harriet) and Erin Markey (Matilda) in Dr. Ride’s American Beach House. (Photo: Ben Arons.)

The production opened with two friends, Harriet (Kristen Sieh) and Matilda (Erin Markey), gathering for their weekly “Two Serious Ladies Book Club” (SLBC) meeting (named for Jane Bowles’s enigmatic 1943 feminist novel). While Matilda is married with a child and Harriet is saddled with a deadbeat boyfriend, clearly something clandestine and queer exists between these two women. The bosom friends expressed their Sapphic desire through a secret greeting in the form of song and an impromptu lap dance, flirtatiously exchanging the chorus of the 1965 pop hit A Groovy Kind of Love— a kind of lavender lingo that conveyed an Oscar Wildean sentiment for a “love that dare not speak its name.” Berkenmeier’s play suggests that such brief encounters, potentially cut short by the pressures of partners and children at any moment, were the only time and place where women, like these, could find a space for queer fellowship. Brook’s staging of this liaison pulled back the proverbial curtain on the kind of secret spaces where queer relationships took self-protective sanctuary in the recent past. Sieh and Markey’s convincing intimate relationship was heightened by their offstage, ongoing artistic collaborations, in work such as in Tina Satter’s evolving performance piece Ghost Rings.

Kristen Sieh (Harriet) has her eyes opened by Marga Gomez (Meg) in Dr. Ride’s American Beach House. (Photo: Ben Arons.)

Regardless of the freedom provided by their recurrent undercover rendezvous, Harriet and Matilda feel stuck in St. Louis, trapped by the normative insipidness of their lives. Their yearning for queer space was initially reflected in their choice of meeting place—the haphazardly decorated rooftop of the museum where Harriet lived and worked, repur-posed as a patio, with an expansive sky, represented at Ars Nova by set designer Kimie Nishikawa’s expansive cyclorama. The velvety blue sky portended Ride’s revolutionary trip to space the next morning, but it also provided a visual symbol for the cosmic challenges placed on same-sex couples during this period.

The dilatory pace of the first scene shifted with the arrival of a lesbian nurse named Meg (Marga Gomez). Meg’s performance of confident out-ness, aided semiotically by Melissa Ng’s butch costume design and Gomez’s signature close-cropped hair, exploded the socially imposed walls of Harriet’s and Matilda’s lives, represented by their teased hair and vintage costumes that epitomized 1980s femininity. While Matilda expressed that she invited Meg to the SLBC meeting as a titillating provocation, it was Harriet whose world was unexpectedly ripped opened when Meg matter-of-factly revealed that her hero, Sally Ride, was a lesbian.

This epiphany, that perhaps Ride is more similar to Harriet than she initially realized, ignited a fire within her to put an escape plan in motion, made real by a transition of Sieh’s physicality from passively frail to empowered and frenetic. When it is revealed that Harriet’s mother has just passed away in Florida, Harriet takes it as...