C'est la Vie.

The show before the show is the expectant crowd seated on Lincoln Center Plaza, tuning in rented headsets and focusing binoculars on the windows of the Radisson Empire Hotel across the street. With C'est la Vie ("That's Life") French performance artist Veronique Guillaud exploits our natural compulsion to stick our noses into other people's business.

Lights begin flashing in windows, and we embark on a ninety-five-minute tour of eleven interwoven, overlapping playlets. Dialogue is broadcast into our earphones and actor-dancers mime in the windows: two spinsters fantasize about go-go boys; newlyweds make love; an old couple spats; a cop grills a suspect; a New York family kvetches; an immigrant adjusts to urban life; an artist throws a trendy party. Periodically, an angelic figure in billowing white ("The Beyond") parades along the roof holding a skeletal umbrella. A TV news jockey warns about ozone depletion, and a spotlighted Statue of Liberty replica atop the nearby Liberty Storage warehouse admonishes us to get out and live life instead of just watching it pass by. Oh, and a guy on the eighth floor just lurks, and at the end checks us out with his binoculars.

What creator Guillaud fails to realize, though, is that peeping into other people's windows is only as intriguing as what's going on inside. The writing in C'est la Vie is mundane, the acting amateurish, movement negligible, and no one even gets naked, so you find your binoculars straying to the pricey decor in neighboring high-rises and the hard bodies in the twenty-four-hour gym across the square. And you wish you could join that third of the audience that has taken Miss Liberty's advice and already left.