New York may think it already has its favorite Guggenheim. Solomon and his museum have stood a long time as proof that a little robber barony can pay off big time for the city, not to mention a poignant reminder of how the wealthy used to spend their money. But after seeing Mercedes Ruehl’s magnificent, braying imitation of Peggy Guggenheim in Lanie Robertson’s “Woman Before a Glass,” we may have to reprioritize.

In this one-woman “triptych in four parts,” Ms. Ruehl as Guggenheim tells the story of how Samuel Beckett told her to start collecting, how she married Max Ernst, how Picasso laughed in her face. Ms. Ruehl and her director, Casey Childs, wrestle a human portrait out of this list of superstars, defying a pedantic script to get a performance of great imagination.

The life in question nearly defies that imagination. Her beloved father went down with the Titanic, and she herself barely escaped the Germans’ advance into France. As the Axis advanced on Paris, she bought a painting a day, escaping first to the United States and later to Venice. Using her millions (not billions, she hastens to tell us), she kept artists alive and made their reputations – buying their art, sending them stipends, or even snatching them out of Nazi hands.

The production assures us this patroness was no paragon. Her list of lovers stretches longer than a Pollack canvas (she got him to paint the big stuff, she claims), and Ms. Ruehl employs a wonderful, earthy leer to tell us about them. This production makes no bones about her ferocious appetite, introducing her in some state of undress each time we see her. At least the audience at the Promenade gets the tame version – she happily informs us that she sunbathes nude on her palazzo’s roof, and her body serves as a “harbinger of spring” to a wide swath of Venetians.

While Guggenheim called both her paintings and her dogs her “children,” her actual offspring saw a cooler side. On these four days in the 1960s, she is forever focusing on where she will bequeath her collection, ignoring a family crisis that bears down inexorably upon her. But her abstraction bespeaks a lifetime of grand, occasionally destructive gestures.

As a vehicle, Mr. Robertson’s play is barely road-worthy. He succumbs to every biographical temptation, and his exposition can be bald to the point of humor. There are long addresses to invisible scene partners offstage, broadly telegraphed “surprises,” and a repetitive, “play-as-list” sensation as we creak through the second and third scenes.

But Mr. Robertson’s subject won’t be contained by triptychs or twinkling rides in a gondola. Guggenheim, you feel, is one of those restless and excitable spirits who barely needs a jostle to rise from the beyond. Ms. Ruehl gives her more than a jostle. And the designers do save the final segment, otherwise a treacly bit of writing, with a low-hanging mirror and a convincingly aqueous light.

The title of the play refers to the dreaming, decaying palaces that stare down into their reflections in the Grand Canal, and the comparison to Guggenheim seems apt. Reclining as in a gondola, Guggenheim muses on her own fractured image in the water below her. Lit in warm tones, Ms. Ruehl’s reflection hangs in the air like a sunset, an appropriately radiant image for her performance. She has transcended her text in order to match her material. While “Glass” itself may have smudges, the women on either side of it still shine. The real Guggenheim and Ms. Ruehl’s reflection: It’s a shattering combination.

(2162 Broadway, 212-239-6200).