"Wishful Drinking" Puts the "Dis" in Dysfunction

Wishful Drinking

Created and performed by Carrie Fisher

Scenic, lighting and projection design by Alexander V. Nichols; production stage manager, Daniel Kells; general manager, Cesa Entertainment, Inc.; directed by Tony Taccone

Performances: Now through October 26, Huntington Theatre Company, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston
Box Office: 617-266-0800 or www.huntingtontheatre.org

When a glitter-enhanced Carrie Fisher stridently lumbers across the Huntington's B.U. stage singing "Happy Days Are Here Again" and wryly tosses confetti in her adoring audience's face, you know you're in for an evening of irreverent comic candor. From now through October 26, Fisher is performing her twisted and gut-wrenchingly funny one-woman autobiographical show, Wishful Drinking, and rest assured this hilarious public exorcism of her personal and professional demons is not to be missed.

Whether assuming a mock professorial demeanor while instructing us in Hollywood inbreeding - complete with a dysfunctional family tree that includes headshots of her mother Debbie Reynolds, father Eddie Fisher, step mother Elizabeth Taylor, and ex-husband Paul Simon - or reviling the Princess Leia iconography that catapulted her to both fame and infamy, Fisher is a saber-toothed hoot. She uses her pungent and at times acid insights to expose the fractured fairytale of hype and celebrity, never hesitating to put herself in the crosshairs of her own rapier wit.

A child star of a child star, Fisher says that she grew up in her mother's nightclub act. Weaned on eccentricity and nurtured by the neglect of parental narcissism, she jokes that she has spent her entire life trying to make up for being "virtually unattended" at birth. As a youngster, she shared a bedroom with a troubled child orphaned by parents more or less related to her through six degrees of marriage and divorce. As a teen, she witnessed the parade of stepmothers who came in and out of her father's life, one not much older than herself. In her 20s she rocketed to fame in Star Wars, had two failed marriages to the same man, wrote the very successful novel and subsequent screenplay for the scathingly funny semi-autobiographical Postcards from the Edge, and got admitted to rehab for the first of many times. A drug addict and alcoholic later diagnosed with manic depression (now called bipolar disorder), Fisher today at 52 could be considered the poster child for survival.

The sarcastically self-effacing actress and scribe refuses to tag herself with that label, however. She also venomously disparages tell-all celebrities while telling all on her own self and family. Fisher's seemingly absurd history - truth being far stranger than fiction - could easily devolve into self-serving 12-step confession. Instead, she transforms her outrageous tale into part stand-up comedy and part theatrical group therapy. Hiding between the lines of her tremendously funny, if understandably warped, view on life is a poignant message of strength and hope - and resilience of the human spirit.

Fisher's singularly intelligent and unsparing repartee surprises and delights at every turn. Her stories offer the same insider star-gazing fix as the best (or is it worst?) of the print and TV tabloids while still somehow managing to respect and accept the very lives she so impudently exposes.

If laughter is the best medicine, Wishful Drinking is the best kind of overdose.

PHOTOS BY KEVIN BERNE: Carrie Fisher in the Berkeley Rep production of Wishful Drinking

 

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