Penny took me to see Woman Before a Glass, a one-woman show about the legendary art dealer and collector Peggy Guggenheim.

The play is a 90 minute monologue written by Lanie Robertson. Mercedes Ruehl gives a tour de force performance as Guggenheim--she's truly wonderful. It's such an over-the-top slipping-into-someone-else's-skin performance that you don't ever really recognize her as Mercedes Ruehl. This effect was probably helped along by the fact that I knew next to nothing about Peggy Guggenheim before the house lights dimmed.

I knew that Guggenheim was legendary for her rollercoaster love affairs with famous artists, and that she had a London gallery then a New York gallery. But I did not know that she was instrumental in getting her huge collection--and Max Ernst himself--out of Europe when the Nazi's occupied France.

The play is very well written--I never felt bored or lost, and I was quite moved by it at times. In the scene where Guggenheim describes learning of her father's death (he died on the Titanic) there is real poetry in the description of New York Harbor, the arrival of the Carpathia with Titanic's survivors, and the emotion of learning of her father's death. Other parts of the text (and performance) were hysterically funny, with Guggenheim going on quite explicitly about her sexual exploits.

Her amazing art collection was left to her uncle's Guggenheim Foundation--which now, of course, operates the Guggenheim franchise all over the world. The collection is still housed in her palazzo in Venice.