Theater Review: “Wishful Drinking,” Created and Performed by Carrie Fisher

“Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time,” Carrie Fisher observes—but with Wishful Drinking, she staves off obscurity for quite a bit longer than what one might expect from someone whose exploits would, under normal circumstances, make her one of those has-beens on “Celebrity Rehab.”

I never got around to reviewing this one-person show before it closed on Sunday at Studio 54. Not that it mattered: it would have done fine with or without my two cents. I’m sure the Roundabout Theatre’s creative honchos would have been delighted if Ms. Fisher had elected to stay longer, what with the way Bye, Bye, Birdie unexpectedly tanked this season. But I guess she had other cities to conquer.

Fisher’s show is, essentially, an audio-visual counterpart to her book of the same name. Before purchasing my ticket, I had bought her memoir for a friend, who later warned me that the best lines would be spoiled for me if I heavily perused this too-much-too-soon autobiography. Because I hadn’t done so, the lines came to me with the joy that surprise and freshness can bring.

“One-woman show” might be one way to describe Fisher’s performance; another might be “comic self-therapy.” If you want a sense of her tone, imagine Dorothy Parker, in all her biting glory, but not sinking under the weight of pills, alcohol and tristesse love affairs/marriages gone awry, but somehow rising to her feet, with even more material because of a wildly dysfunctional family.

How dysfunctional? So dysfunctional it requires the aid of a blackboard (in the image accompanying this post)—a hilarious prop you won’t find in Fisher’s book—to explicate all the marriages and liaisons ensuing from the infamous triangle involving her mother, Debbie Reynolds; her father, singer Eddie Fisher; and Elizabeth Taylor—that generation’s equivalent of the Jennifer Aniston-Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie triangle, she helpfully translates for the audience.

Amazingly, Reynolds’ two-timing, drug-using ex (“Puff Granddaddy,” the wheelchair-bound octogenarian is now nicknamed) was not the worst of her mates. In fact, since two of them ended up swindling her of all her savings, the former ingénue of Singing in the Rain was being entirely accurate when she predicted to her daughter that Fisher “might turn out to be the good one.”

(Oh, did I mention that one of Carrie’s stepfathers had a hairdresser who moonlighted as a pimp? Or that Reynolds, responding to her daughter’s rejection of the notion that she might want to sleep with her stepfather, answered, in one of the great non sequiturs in history: “Just read The Enquirer, dear—it’s a weird world out there!”)

At the matinee I attended in October, Fisher invited to the stage her teenage daughter Billie, up in the Northeast for a visit, to try on a version of the mouse-like coiffeur Fisher had sported, to immortal effect, as Princess Leia in Star Wars. The occasion provided an opportunity to demonstrate how Hollywood filmmakers can be just as weird as the process of filmmaking. (Director George Lucas advised her that she couldn’t wear a bra under her white dress because “there’s no underwear in space.”)

The New York Times reported early in the show’s run that, at the request of Warren Beatty, Ms. Fisher deleted some risqué material on her former Shampoo co-star. Despite their short-lived marriage, Paul Simon also emerges relatively unscathed here. (She slips in that one of his lines from the song “Hearts and Bones” concerns their relationship, the story of “One and one-half wandering Jews” who “speculate who had been damaged the most.”)

Yet it wasn’t this constant family lunacy, or the insane demands of Tinseltown, or her own well-publicized struggles with drug abuse and bipolar disorder that provoked the most fascination at the performance I saw—it was Fisher’s 2004 discovery, in her bed, of a good friend, a gay GOP campaign consultant, dead of a drug overdose. Audience members asked her just about everything you could imagine, including, “Did you sleep with him?” and “Did he leave you any money?” (No and no were the answers.)

(The incident also led to the monologuist regaling her Blue State audience with an anecdote they ate up. Her friend the GOP operative, she related, had, in his younger years, known George W. Bush, who, as a wild and crazy fellow, could cut farts that would leave a big stink—sort of like the way he departed the Presidency, she said.)

If Reynolds was The Unsinkable Molly Brown, then her daughter, with her horrors recounted, faced and dispatched with one-liners, is in another realm of the eternal survivor entirely. “If you claim something, you own it,” she says—and she did so here to hilarious and triumphant effect.