The life and times of Peggy Guggenheim unfolds on the Carl Cherry stage.

Art collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim was born in 1898 into an extraordinary Ashkenazi Jewish family. Her rich father went down with the Titanic in a tux, on a deck chair with brandy and a cigar. Her uncle Solomon founded the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, Spain.

But it was her own life that inspired playwright Al Schnupp, theater faculty at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, to write a play about her. It’s called The Collection.

“[Peggy] was a liberated woman who assumed and/or demanded the same rights attributed to men,” Schnupp says.

The play moves forward in time starting in 1912 when her mother tells her, “Aren’t you a bit old for collecting frivolous little trinkets… and imbuing them with sentiment?”

Mom has no idea.

It unfurls in 34 episodes, each one its own vignette of Peggy’s life: jet-setting, sexual escapades, broken marriages, strained relationship with her kids, her legacy and internal neuroses. The plot strands reach across the timeline of her life, characters return, themes see different treatments and updates, and the writing stays smart, pushing the scenes to satisfying conclusions.

Art accompanies it all, serving as transition, prop, backdrop, thematic clues, atmosphere and subject. In 1928, Peggy asks aspiring writer John Holms, who she’s having an affair with in St. Tropez, about his father:

“What Theo paints – that’s my father,” he tells her. “Strong. Rigid. Organized blocks of color. As uncompromising as the Bible.” The scene features one of Theo van Doesburg’s paintings.

While 30-some-odd paintings by Willem de Kooning, Rene Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico and others make appearances, real-life friends, lovers and associates including Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp appear in the flesh.

Duchamp tells Peggy she has a gift.

“Yes. I know,” she replies. “Father’s inheritance. The benefactor of his labors.”

“Your gift is not having the money,” he says. “Your gift is knowing how to use it.

The story builds over each episode, the writing and the acting – by four young actors from Cal Poly-SLO – filling out these characters as graphically as a portrait painting. Peggy is not the most embraceable person, but she’s a woman of unapologetic intelligence, yearning for meaning, faithful to her own headwinds.

THE COLLECTION runs 7:30pm Fri-Sat, July 30-31, at Carl Cherry Center, Fourth and Guadalupe, Carmel. $20. 624-7491, www.CarlCherry.org.