Coughing Up (Metaphorical) Bloody Sputum Onstage: Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking

From her auspicious beginnings, surrounded by deceptions and torrid romances and seeming insanity (Reynolds once requested that Carrie bear the child of her last husband, as Reynolds was post-menopausal but was convinced they child would have nice eyes), Carrie Fisher leads the audience inexorably towards her own intersection with eternal fame and notoriety: Star Wars.

Before the first act closes, Carrie regales the audience with the sort of details many clearly expected (to judge from the intermission exodus). George Lucas is a bit nuts and refused to let her wear a bra, informing her with the certainty of personal experience that, "People in space don't wear bras." (Lucas eventually explained his idea to her last year after seeing the show, but it really only makes sense in zero-gravity, and none of the characters--or at least Leia--in the movies are ever really in zero-gravity.) And yes, she has insane stalkers, feels cursed to have been in a role for which she'll be forever remembered, and has plenty of complaints about fans' sexual obsession with her, particularly the anatomically-correct collectibles displaying her "galaxy snatch."

The second act is more subdued than the first, and mostly delves into the nightmare of her own adult life: her torrid marriage to Paul Simon, her drug and alcohol addictions, the discovery that she was manic-depressive (a photo of her as Princess Leia apparently graces some textbooks on the subject). Carrie Fisher is an accomplished performer with impeccable comic timing and an old-fashioned willingness to directly engage the audience, but in the end Wishful Drinking isn't just a comic bit, it's the story of a survivor, and a sincere one at that, even if the painful, earnest bits are offset by sarcasm and humor. Overall, the single biggest complaint we have with the show is that it feels a bit like gay camp (Fisher's mother, coincidentally, recently performed with the Seattle Men's Chorus).

We suppose that confronted with the awkward choice of either embracing Star Wars fans or campy Golden Age of Hollywood obsessed gays, we'd choose the latter too. Better to mock the pretensions of Hollywood's glamorous royalty (she refers to her family as "blue-blood white-trash") than to endlessly answer inane questions from nerds. (We hear that ticket-holders will not be admitted wearing Star Wars costumes, one of Fisher's specific requests.) And of course there's nothing wrong with gay camp, but it does serve to distract somewhat from the ostensible point. Camp rejects the real and earnest, while the rest of us crave the visceral sensation of seeing that diseased bit of lung come up. Fisher has overcome a lot and gained a lot of insight that's put to good effect (Fisher is a talented writer). Ending on a gag may be an easier pill to swallow for the audience, but it doesn't allow for schadenfreude-induced catharsis in quite the same way.