That Light-Saber Wit

From the Road, Carrie Fisher Tells Her Story With Dark, Dry Humor

HARTFORD, Conn. -- "My life is so bizarre, I never found that I needed to have an imagination," Carrie Fisher deadpans as she sits in a tiny Connecticut dressing room recently, resting after a performance of "Wishful Drinking," her autobiographical solo show.

A glass of Coca-Cola Zero rests on the counter in front of her, next to the makeup vials, but the caffeine evidently has not socked in yet: She looks fatigued. Her eyelids are still thickly caked with the glitter she wears in the production, which arrives tomorrow at Washington's Lincoln Theatre on U Street, courtesy of Arena Stage.

"Wishful Drinking" has been staged in a number of U.S. cities, including Hartford. By last month's final performance at Hartford Stage, it had been a rather long 12 days of performing in the city, or so her rather glum tones imply. But she becomes a little more animated during a digression that involves explicating a tattoo on her lower leg.

"See this part right here?" she says, pointing to the cartoonish image of a galaxy. "The moon and star? Well, I got that first, and it looked like the Turkish flag. And although I like Turkey, I didn't want to advertise it or celebrate it on my ankle! So then I went back again -- and I was completely manic -- and I said, 'Would you fix this?' "

The Sunset Boulevard tattoo artist turned out to be an ex-felon, she says, and he regaled her with colorful crime stories while supplementing her tattoo with planets and a gray-purple background. "I stopped watching what he was doing," Fisher remembers. "So by the time I got back to seeing it, it looked like I'd been kicked by outer space!"

Intriguing anecdotes abound in the annals of Fisher, 51, whose career, love life and family history have given her a tour of lurid tabloid culture from the inside. Fisher is, after all, the daughter of film star Debbie Reynolds -- known for her perky turn in "Singin' in the Rain" -- and singer Eddie Fisher, known, among other things, for dumping Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor.

Having survived a childhood in a house that had three swimming pools, Fisher branded herself indelibly on international consciousness when she portrayed Princess Leia in "Star Wars" -- an episode that's dryly commemorated in "Wishful Drinking" with a show-and-tell featuring audience participation and a life-size Princess Leia sex doll.

After achieving fame with Darth Vader and the gang, Fisher went on to become an in-demand Hollywood script doctor, as well as a blockbuster novelist (her book "Postcards From the Edge" became a movie with Meryl Streep). And she still acts: She's been in "30 Rock" and "Weeds" and has a role in the film "The Women," opening Sept. 12.

But she's not too happy about her Tinseltown track record. "I never wanted to be in show business," says Fisher, who appeared in her mother's nightclub act as a youngster, despite severe stage fright. "As I was getting older -- as a teenager -- I watched my parents' careers just kind of nosedive. So I always knew that it's not permanent, and that there's a heartbreaking component to it. So, who would want that? It's not like I even went into show business -- like I think some people do -- thinking that if they get enough attention, they'll be healed. I don't think I'm going to be healed."

There would be a good deal to heal, after she buckled to family expectations and joined the entertainment industry (landing a part in the 1975 Warren Beatty movie "Shampoo"). Fisher has famously battled addiction and bipolar disorder, grim experiences she discusses with barbed irreverence in "Wishful Drinking." The show originally sprouted from autobiographical material she'd cobbled together for speeches to advocacy groups for the mentally ill.

The script, which Fisher says she has been continually reworking, also gives a stoically humorous spin to such episodes as Fisher's longtime romance with (and brief marriage to) pop music icon Paul Simon. (She has a daughter from another relationship, with agent Bryan Lourd.) And the show locates the absurdist threads in the scandal surrounding the death of her close friend R. Gregory Stevens, a Republican media adviser who died in Fisher's bed in 2005.

Some of Fisher's trials are more recent still. She says she recently underwent electroshock therapy for depression, and that she has had to cope with the memory lapses that can be a side effect. "It's rough, but it's fascinating, the memory loss," she confides. "You literally get yourself back again. Like suddenly waking up and discovering that you're who you are." One drawback is losing her sense of direction: "I've never been able to find my way to this dressing room."

Although Fisher officially became an author after a publishing house solicited a manuscript while she was in rehab (she responded with "Postcards From the Edge"), she says she adopted writing as a self-medicating technique during her youth. "If you have a manic brain, it's a calming kind of rhythmic way to get out of that," she says.

When she was an adolescent, she recalls, "My mother called me a bookworm. And she didn't say it in a nice way! So, yeah, I liked that. Books were my first drug. Everything works out well in them, and it's very organized and calming. I fell in love with words."

And the words seem to love her back. "Carrie is really a gifted comic writer," says "Wishful Drinking" director Tony Taccone. "She has an unbelievable sense of a laugh line. So I never worried about that at all." When he began shaping the show -- prior to its run at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California, where he is artistic director (an earlier incarnation debuted at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles) -- he encouraged Fisher to temper the wit with more somber confessional elements.

"I really tried to get her comfortable with being quiet at some times, showing her that she could hold the stage and the audience was totally engaged, and she could go darker and it wouldn't hurt," Taccone says. "She really doesn't like to do that, because the darkness is pretty dark. It's painful."

Besides, he added, "she really didn't want to appear to be indulgent or whining." The version that broke box-office records at Berkeley Rep, he thinks, successfully avoided that trap. "It just feels truthful," he says, "and that's powerful."

Fisher is conscious of challenges involved in tight-roping between the sobering and the antic. "When most of this stuff happened to me, it wasn't funny," she says. "But that's the alchemy -- to make it funny."