Written and performed by: Carrie Fisher. At: Bank of America Theatre, 18 W. Monroe St. Phone: 800-775-2000; $25-$65. Runs through: Oct. 16
It's almost too easy to feel bad for Carrie Fisher. She's battled prescription drug abuse, alcoholism and bipolar disorder; her lineage has been so marred by Hollywood scandal that it's more akin to a family tumbleweed. And it surely would've been enough just to have a likeness forever and inextricably linked to Star Wars heroine and geek goddess Princess Leia.
Yet Fisher asks for no sympathy in Wishful Drinking, her one-woman comedy show, now in its sixth year and passing through the Bank of America Theatre for a two-week engagement. In fact, the only thing Fisher requests is some audience participation, and even then she plainly states she doesn't care what you do or think, though chances are you might be struck enough by her candid and self-deprecating display to play along.
Wishful Drinking plays more as a calculated and wry stand-up routine, where the success hinges as much on Fisher's ability to break down the wall between herself and the audience and turn a huge theater into an intimate performance space as it does on the material that is her roller-coaster life.
This public forum for her unabashed attitude toward her tabloid-chronicled past could well be a personal coping mechanism scripted and staged for monetary gain, but she provides the audience some refreshing transparency into the celebrity psyche. More importantly, she delivers her unapologetic discourse with the sincerity of a close friend.
Fisher touches on the whole gamut from her rehab and mental institution stints to the scandalous romances of her parents Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds to her own love life including relationships with legendary songwriter Paul Simon and Bryan Lourd, who gave Fisher her daughter Billie and announced he was gay. She carries a commendable sense of humor through each and every topic and drives home the point of "How could anyone not?"
For all the self-mockery, however, Fisher tastefully indulges her fans through a number of Star Wars bits. As she also shares with the audience, when you're stuck with an image or label, you wear it proudly, even if wearing it literally means a cinnamon-bun braided hairdo. Of course as much as she appeases the audience with Leia routine, she can't help but make fun of the acting deficiencies and naivety of her then-19-year-old self. With abundant sarcasm she jabs at George Lucas and thanks him for the countless self-image problems that come with being immortalized as a geek sex symbol. As with the rest of her act, it shows how age tears at celebrity, but with it comes a seasoned knowledge and the perspective necessary to cope.
Wishful Drinking aims to be a crowd-pleaser that Fisher supplements with terrific wit and a great measure of insight that for all her issues reminds us this was the woman who wrote Postcards from the Edge among other books. Her life might have been a mess, but few of today's tabloid magnets have half her wit or self-awareness.
So while her glimpse behind the celebrity curtain might be dated in terms of material, given the exposure of today's high-profile Hollywood figures and consequently the extra shroud of privacy and PR spin, for anyone who has lived that experience to come out and present it in such a way that doesn't talk down to its audience feels like a real treat. Fisher might be laughing at herself, but we're laughing with her.