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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Wishful Drinking — Carrie-ing On As Best She Can
By Harry Haun
05 Oct 2009
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Wishful Drinking star Carrie Fisher; opening night guests Jane Fonda, Martha Plimpton and Debra Monk
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| photo by Joan Marcus (Fisher) and Aubrey Reuben | "Hello, I'm Carrie Fisher, and I'm an alcoholic," the lady declared at the top of Wishful Drinking, her autobiographical act that bowed Oct. 4 at Studio 54.
This turns out to be the good news. For almost two and a half hours of quips and chatter and hilariously healing self-depreciation, Fisher is the roller-coaster conductor of her life, careering from chemical highs to all sorts of lows and lowers.
A self-described "manic-depressive, alcoholic, addict with the powers to turn men bald and gay" makes quite a chaotic journey, so fasten your seatbelts at the station.
Wishful Drinking is postscripts from the edge — musings on the life that late she led, how through all manner and man-made turbulence she has finally made it to shore and a relatively safe (for now) harbor. Her comic style, sardonic and smart, is to view the wreckage from on high, wryly and wisely, almost detached except that she manages to pull you into her corner and her own uniquely skewed view of life.
Fisher wrote the book on galloping dysfunction — figuratively and literally. Simon & Schuster published it last year, and the author recites vast chunks of the text verbatim and lickety-split. Miraculously, she somehow makes it all appear fresh and spur-of-the-moment. That's the actress in her. She's a much better actress than last month's horror flick, "Sorority Row," would have led you to suspect. She can spike a line with italic timing, then follow it up with a funny two-or-three-word undertow.
She treats praise, in character, with deflective good-humor. "Well, I'm playing a part that's close to me," she shrugged later in the long lobby of "54" when she emerged from her epic confessional. "I didn't want to give away the ending — but I live."
Her problems began at birth, to hear her tell it. She comes from "simple folks" — if "simple" is remotely the right word for Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher at the hysterical height of their mid-'50s heyday. Carrie's dad fainted in the delivery room dead away at the sight of her entrance, and the flock of nurses attending the birth rushed to him, triggering a lifelong "pathetic bid for the attention I lacked as a newborn" and culminating with the evening's entertainment.
Life in her goldfish bowl was a constantly churning affair, and it went into Double Rinse when The Widow Todd entered the waters. Elizabeth Taylor more or less borrowed Carrie's dad for a few years, wrecking the marriage and many a fan-magazine myth. At this point, a chalkboard descends from the rafters, cluttered with 8x10 glossies, and allows Fisher, marker in hand, to launch into a quickie course of Hollywood Inbreeding 101. Reason for the lecture? Her daughter, Billie Lourd, started dating Rhys Tivey, who happens to be Elizabeth Taylor's grandson, and they were just wondering if they were committing incest. Fisher's findings: "You're related by scandal" — arguably, the century's yummiest.
When one commends the massive memory feat involved in doing a show like this, Fisher says you don't know the half of it, and factors in "LSD, ECT — and age."
The irony that Roundabout booked Wishful Drinking at Studio 54, scene of her early days of wine and roses, was not lost on Fisher. "Déjà vu," she exclaimed on opening night and wondered aloud if people were still having sex in the balcony. The balcony roared back affirmatively. It was also, she recalled rather wistfully, "the place where I had my first dance with my first husband."
Husband No. 1 was Paul Simon, "a short Jewish singer" (like Daddy, she noted with a nudge to Freud). It was a rocky marriage, but he incorporated her into some of his lyrics, which she was happy to give a deconstructed, bittersweet replay.
Her second marriage — to Bryan Lourd — produced Billie, now 17, and ended when he met Scott, "making Scott" (she said in a line not used on opening night) "the man who got the man who got away." Lourd has since gone bald, too.
Another irony in life, given her Rodeo Drive roots, is that she'd find fame in a film called "Star Wars," playing the iconic Princess Leia Organa. But fame had a downer, too: that monstrously unbecoming hairpiece with the matching Danish buns over her ears. Considering the curve balls she's been thrown in life, it's a miracle she can laugh at all — and translate that into a group therapy that resembles entertainment. Continued...
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