A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Carrie Fisher grew up on a planet called Hollywood.
It was a place that was a little bit like the rest of America, but different in key particulars. The house where young Carrie and her brother, Todd, were raised had eight miniature pink refrigerators, she says, so the family would be prepared "if Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs came to visit." The grounds of the estate had three swimming pools "in case two broke."
And how would Fisher describe the year her celebrity parents, actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, divorced (she was 2) and the breakup made the tabloids?
"My friends call it the Star Wars," she says.
All this is chronicled in the performer's entertaining one-woman show, Wishful Drinking, running at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington courtesy of Arena Stage. Over more than two hours, Fisher covers such topics as growing up as a celebrity daughter and becoming a cultural legend (Princess Leia) at age 19. She also discusses her first marriage to singer-songwriter Paul Simon; her second marriage to Bryan Lourd, a talent agent who left her for another man; her struggles with bipolar disorder; and the traumatic discovery in 2005 that a close friend had died in her bed.
During the show, the audience laughs hard so frequently that it's only in retrospect it realizes many events have a tragic undercurrent.
"If my life weren't funny, it would just be true," Fisher says, "and that would be unacceptable."
In any autobiographical show, some distortion and fictionalization occur. That's true even if every line of dialogue is delivered verbatim.
Some anecdotes get included, but others are left out. Some events were painful when experienced but become funny in the retelling. One version of the truth is offered for public consumption, but it's fragmented and discrete.
So it's no surprise that the show has evolved considerably in the two years since Fisher began performing it. The performance now features a question-and-answer portion and lots of audience interaction, but Fisher has excised some material (about kissing Star Wars co-star Harrison Ford, among other things) and inserted new stories.
One of the funniest bits, however, remains unchanged: In "Hollywood Inbreeding 101," Fisher uses a blackboard to trace the tangled marital history of her parents, their combined seven spouses and their respective offspring.
