They're Standing Up for Themselves

It'd Be Sad if She Didn't Make It So Funny

In the life-stories-that-can-be-used-for-cabaret-style-drama department, Carrie Fisher's got the goods: teenage fame, mental illness, addiction, marriage to a man who left her for a man, a famous father who left her famous mother for the even-more-famous Elizabeth Taylor.

And all of that was before one of her best friends died of a drug overdose while sleeping next to her.

"But my thing that I say is, 'If my life wasn't funny, it would just be true," the 51-year-old actress explains. And funny is the point of her one-woman autobiographical show, "Wishful Drinking," which opens tonight at the Lincoln Theatre.

The show (really a series of confessional anecdotes) was born a few years back after Fisher, who shot to stardom as the hair-bunned Princess Leia in "Star Wars" and was married to singer-songwriter Paul Simon for a few years in the 1980s, kept finding herself on stage for a very different reason.

"I'd been doing speeches for a while," she says on the phone from Los Angeles. (Well, probably L.A.; when asked if that's where she was, Fisher croaked in response: "I think so.") The speeches, she says, were in acceptance of "mental illness awards. . . . That's mainly what I'm honored for, 'cause I'm very good at being mentally ill. And so this material kind of evolved in that arena."

"It's sort of the alchemy of making stuff that was at one time painful, funny," she adds.

And by her own account, the painful stuff started right from the beginning. During her birth, mom Debbie Reynolds was unconscious and dad Eddie Fisher fainted. "So when I arrived, I was virtually unattended," she says in the show. "And I have been trying to make up for that ever since. This show is just another pathetic bid for the attention I lacked as a child."

Fisher, who has been very public about her struggles with drugs, alcohol and bipolar disorder, says comedy has always been her survival strategy of choice.

"It takes a while, depending on how difficult the circumstance is -- like to wake up with someone in bed with you that is dead or have a psychotic episode or to have ECT [electroconvulsive therapy]. At the time, when those things happen, they're not funny," she says. "But after a while they are; they have to be. Or they're just tragic."

Filled with Hollywood gossip (which equals family gossip in Fisher's case), the show was deemed a "Beverly Hills yard sale of juicy anecdotes" by a Los Angeles Times theater critic when it debuted there in 2006.

And although it's pretty much all about her in "Wishful Drinking," Fisher's act does include a lot of audience participation that keeps the performances fresh and occasionally turns the show into something of a group therapy session. "I get people who share their life with me," she says. "It's very immediate. And you have this relationship and this exchange, and I like that."

Fisher says she's not quite sure who arranged to have the show come to Washington via Arena Stage ("some of these things happened right after I had ECT, and it ruins your memory"), but the actress is already expecting to feel right at home.

"The Georgetown psychiatric department has bought 200 tickets to one night. So that's one of my favorite things that has happened," she says. "Those are my people."

Wishful Drinking Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U St NW. 202-488-3300.http://www.arenastage.org. Today-Sept. 28. $59-$74.