How astronaut Sally Ride coming out as gay inspired a St. Louis playwright

St. Louis native Liza Birkenmeier started out in theater as an actress. At 11, she appeared at the Muny in the children’s chorus of a production of “Annie.” But while studying playwriting at Washington University, she found she didn’t enjoy being onstage as much as creating the worlds that actors moved within.

One of her early theater pieces as a playwright incorporated interviews with Midwestern youths who were queer or trans. Another included recordings of patrons at Mokabe’s Coffeehouse on South Grand.

There’s also a St. Louis flavor to “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House,” the play St. Louis Actors’ Studio is now giving its local debut at the Gaslight Theater. Annamarie Pileggi, associate artistic director, directs a cast of four.

Small onstage moments have big reverberations in the slyly funny, subtle play. It takes place during one evening on a south St. Louis rooftop, where women meet for a book club but wind up wrestling with their own identities after learning that astronaut Sally Ride was gay. Ride was married to a man in 1983 when she became the first American woman to go to space, but she came out in her 2012 obituary.

“A lot of my feelings on queerness present themselves in various, sneaky ways throughout the play,” said Birkenmeier, 37. “But I think that anyone who's from here or has a background in the Midwest more generally might feel the summer nightness, the fullness of possibility that’s in the private space of the roof, more than someone who’s from another place.”