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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The secret to performance, Charlie Chaplin once quipped, is "entrances and exits." This issue bedevils the one-person show--a genre that is, for obvious commercial reasons, attractive to producers and, for obvious dramaturgical reasons, problematic for audiences. Why is this character in front of us? What has compelled him or her to step onto the stage? The character must somehow bring news--both of society and of the self. But if everything is narrated what is dramatized?
"Woman Before a Glass" (directed by Casey Childs, at the Promenade) is a one-woman show about the expatriate art patron and mistress of modernism Peggy Guggenheim. Guggenheim seems to have had two abiding addictions: painting and penises. Although she didn't have "the fortune of a face," she had the fortune of, well, a fortune, which gave her enormous sex appeal, and she devoted her life to making a spectacle of her power. When the conductor Thomas Schippers asked her how many husbands she'd had, "Mrs. Guggenheim," as she was known, shot back, "D'you mean my own, or other people's?" Rumor had it that Guggenheim had slept with more than a thousand men; she certainly bedded, among others, Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy, Roland Penrose,...
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