SOLOS AND SOLITARIES.(Woman Before a Glass)(Theater Review)

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, and Max Ernst, to whom she was briefly married. And of all the isms she embraced--Surrealism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism--the most defining ism was sadomasochism. She wrote, for instance, of her tempestuous first marriage, to the writer Laurence Vail, "When our fights worked up to a grand finale he would rub jam in my hair. But what I hated most was being knocked down in the streets."

Faced with such a welter of biographical possibility, the playwright Lanie Robertson seems as confused about how to approach his subject as he is about what to call his play, which is coyly subtitled "A Triptych in Four Parts." Instead of choosing where on his canvas to place the first stroke, Robertson simply drops the brush. In the manner of Jackson Pollock, whom Guggenheim famously launched, Robertson dribbles words everywhere. The show opens as a TV crew is filming Guggenheim at her villa in Venice. From the first ingratiating beat--Guggenheim appears, with a cigarette dangling from her lips and a glaring stain on her Fortuny gown, bad-mouthing her maid for having chosen this day to go on vacation--the play makes it clear that this is a diva watch, not a drama. As played by Mercedes Ruehl, Guggenheim, whom the Venetians called "the last duchess," is a grande dame in Dame Edna bat glasses. Ruehl is a powerful, sexual woman of a certain age, whose nervy, wisecracking energy turns Guggenheim's domineering self-absorption into a form of congeniality.

Although the script documents Guggenheim's voracity, it never attempts to examine, or even to imply, the emptiness that her manic intellectual and emotional gourmandizing tried to fill. Apart from a couple of sour asides about Guggenheim's mother, "Woman Before a Glass" makes no reference to its heroine's psychological damage. "My childhood was excessively unhappy," Guggenheim wrote. "I have no pleasant memories of any kind." Her youth was lonely and restricted: she didn't attend school until she was fifteen. She had two children with her first husband, but she was a neglectful and selfish mother. In a fit of irritation, she once told her daughter, Pegeen, that she would rather have a Picasso than her. (It is no wonder, then, that Pegeen, who became a painter, finally succeeded in killing herself, after more than a dozen attempts, in 1967.) Here, through the creakiest of expository devices, Robertson contrives to telegraph Guggenheim's misguided love and ambitions for her daughter by having Pegeen offstage in the bathroom, preparing for an exhibit of her art that her mother has arranged. Later, in an even more vulgar attempt to manufacture drama, he has Guggenheim working two telephone lines at once: talking about disposing of her collection on one, and about her daughter disposing of herself on the other.

Although there is plenty hanging above this play--an escritoire, a mirror, and a ...