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Carrie on My Wayward Princess
Wishful Drinking
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“If my life weren’t funny, it would just be true, and that would be unacceptable.” – Carrie Fisher
Carrie Fisher, iconic actress, immortalized for her role as Star Wars’ Princess Leia, accomplished author and aspiring “Bi-Polar Woman of the Year” entertains, informs and inspires in Wishful Drinking, her sober, but still sarcastic, one woman show at the Roundabout Theater, an ironic setting considering the decadence and depravity that partied on to a disco beat when the building was home to the notorious adult Disneyland known as Studio 54.
In Wishful Drinking, Ms. Fisher, the daughter of 1950’s America’s sweethearts, actress Debbie Reynolds and crooner Eddie Fisher, sings, recalls explicit anecdotes and takes questions from the audience all in attempt to explain the first half century in the life of a daughter of Hollywood royalty, a life barely distinguishable from her novel/screenplay Postcards from the Edge.
From the opening bars of “Happy Days Are Here Again” to the song’s reprise, a fast moving two hours and one intermission later, Ms. Fisher is in surprisingly strong voice and even better humor as she recalls the lighter side of what she calls Hollywood inbreeding, drug addiction, electroshock treatment and even waking up to find a dear friend dead next to her in bed, a party trick she advises the audience not to try themselves, as it tends to throw the hostess off her game for a year or three.
Helping illustrate Ms. Fisher’s torrid but true tales is a backdrop of photos and tabloid newspaper clippings that celebrated the ups and downs of a life spent under the media’s telephoto lens. From the breakup of Debbie and Eddie (the Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston of their day) at the bedside of a grieving Elizabeth Taylor (the Angelina Jolie of the Eisenhower age), to the twisted roots of her own family tree, to a peek at her childhood mansion, an industrial looking structure with multiple pink refrigerators and extra swimming pools, the audience slowly and giddily understands the high priced madness that was the young Carrie’s day to day existence. A life that just got weirder and more unwieldy thanks to a certain cinematic war fought “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”
To Ms. Fisher’s credit she doesn’t try and blame the media or a voyeuristic society for the troubles that brought her multiple trips to rehab. Her brother Todd, who grew up under the same National Enquirer’s scrutiny, turned out fine and despite it all Carrie herself managed to create her proudest work of all, her now teenaged daughter Billie, who wants to be either a neurosurgeon of a singer/actress.
The key, according to Fisher, to sweetening life’s lemons is not in washing them down with massive amounts of pills, booze, shopping and sex (a.k.a. a typical Vegas weekend), but in seeing the humor in it all and not letting it drive you batty until you can put enough perspective on it to make even the most tragic misadventure seem amusing. And occasional electroshock apparently doesn’t hurt either, at least not that she remembers.
So, you don’t have to be a Star Wars geek to appreciate Carrie Fisher in Wishful Thinking, but it wouldn’t hurt to have been one of the few the proud, the pubescent who polished their light saber to the face that launched a thousand rebel space ships. Anyone who has thought their family a little odd, doubted the value of their existence or sought refuge in the bottom of a bottle of anything, can benefit from Fisher’s tale of survival and walk out of the theater thinking, hey, if she can live through all that and laugh about it, maybe waking up tomorrow isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a person, no matter what galaxy they’re from.