'I'm pretty sane about my insanity'

Carrie Fisher shares painful and funny stories about her stardom and struggles in a one-woman show

Carrie Fisher, at the Geffen Playhouse in Hollywood (top) and performing in ''Wishful Drinking'' (left) earlier this year. (©axel koester (above); kevin berne)

HARTFORD - Back in a temporary apartment after performing her one-woman show "Wishful Drinking," Carrie Fisher slides into bed with a pack of smokes. She asks a reporter to join her for a little honest conversation.

"I like doing the show," she coos, her voice thick with cigarettes. "I like interacting with the audience."

Typical theater talk, until Fisher goes on: "I have doctors that are very happy that I talk about these things. There's a whole psychiatric college that wants to come to the show."

She laughs and flutters her eyelids, which are painted with glittery eye-shadow. Fisher is excited and exhausted. But she's happy to be here, she says, and credits ECT - electroconvulsive therapy, otherwise known as electric shock treatments.

She just had a round a month before her Hartford engagement.

"Electric shock therapy," she says, leaning in, as if telling a secret. "If there's a depression that you are having that you can't get through easily . . . It was [expletive] fantastic."

Fisher, 52, is a Hollywood survivor who's led a thorny and eventful life - a funny-sad saga that she's more than willing to share, in person, in print, and now on stage. "Wishful Drinking" arrives Friday for a two-week run at the Huntington Theatre.

To one generation she'll always be Princess Leia from "Star Wars." But after largely giving up acting, Fisher went on to become a celebrity writer. Her best-selling novel, "Postcards From the Edge," was loosely based on Fisher and her mother, actress Debbie Reynolds. Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine memorably played the leads in the 1990 movie.

Fisher has also become one of the best-known script doctors in Hollywood, cleaning up the screenplays of other writers. "Oh, I love doing it," she says, letting out a puff of smoke.

It was nearly four years ago when everything almost came to a halt and Fisher came undone.

She woke up one morning and found her close friend R. Gregory Stevens, a 42-year-old Republican political operative, dead in her bed. The death was ruled an accidental overdose. Fisher fell to pieces. Her hair turned white. She locked herself in her house. After many years clean, she started to use drugs again.

Eventually she climbed out of the hole and began to get her life back.

"Wishful Drinking" begins from that horrifying moment and details the subsequent ups and downs for all to see. Fisher got the idea for the play by observing the comedic solo shows of John Leguizamo and others. She says she had given so many roasts for "Star Wars" creator George Lucas that she knew she had the material.

On stage Fisher begins the show with one hand giving the middle finger and the other a peace sign. Using a chalkboard she eagerly dishes about Reynolds and her famous father, singer Eddie Fisher, and their celebrity friends and flings. She describes her love affair with Paul Simon and with Hollywood agent Bryan Lourd, who turned out to be gay. Using a sex doll and wig, she talks about her role as Princess Leia - the part that "ruined my life," she says with glee.

Threaded throughout the performance is her struggle with bipolar disorder and drug addiction. Her story is tragic, but she tells it with ironic belly-laughs.

"If my life wasn't funny," she says to a pleased audience," it would just be true."

ECT is a controversial procedure in which electric currents are passed through the brain, deliberately triggering a brief seizure. It is believed to cause changes in the brain chemistry that can alleviate certain mental illnesses.

In Fisher's case, it's a severe case of bipolar disorder that, she says, leaves her locked up inside her home, manic. She tried electroconvulsive therapy for the first time right before her Hartford engagement.

Not only did she have to relearn her lines, she says staring dead ahead and lighting yet another cigarette, she had to relearn who she was.

"The memory loss thing is heavy at the beginning,"' Fisher explains. "It's like I still meet people that know me and I don't know them. My sense of direction is shot. I still can't find my dressing room."

But things had been even worse.

"They gave it to me one day before I did the show, and the show was three hours," she says. "Some person emerges that isn't you. I forgot that I was sober."

She regained her sense of self - slowly.

"It's fascinating," she says, her eyes widening. "It's 'Oh my God! I'm friends with Salman Rushdie! Oh my God! I know Meryl Streep!' I come back at it like I am some pedestrian that came from Detroit and I got Carrie Fisher's life. It's fantastic. It ends up being a miracle!"

Without the medical assistance, Fisher says life would be too hard to take.

"It really, really works," she says with sudden clarity. "It hits some part of your brain that is not working properly. Like, I can have something bad happen to me and I can deal with it."

She maintains this clarity on stage. "I'm pretty sane about my insanity," she tells the audience at one point.

Her director, Tony Taccone, says he copes - "nervously" - with the ECT and memory loss. "OK Carrie, what don't you remember this time?" he'll sometimes have to say with a chuckle. "It's not the kind of thing you look forward to, but I think she makes more of it than it is."

Fisher's performance is like none other he's directed, Taccone says.

"Carrie is a phenomenon," he says. "She stimulates some kind of reaction from the audience. Maybe it's her Hollywood pedigree or star power. People just want to see her, touch her. [And] by peeling back the comedy a little bit, we understand a great truth."

Despite the difficult subject matter and irreverent tone, Fisher says her parents loved the show, which they saw in Hartford. "I run everything by them to see if they are OK with it," she says. "I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable."

That includes her audience, which tends to include senior citizens, alcoholics, and mentally ill people. At the Hartford show, she singled out a group of mentally-ill attendees whom she asked to raise their hands in a sign of solidarity.

In fact, many people come up to Fisher after "Wishful Drinking" saying they can relate. Sometimes it's awkward.

"One guy said to me that he had a psychotic episode like I did," she says, pausing before bursting into laughter. "He said it just like he would've said, 'Gee, I have that shirt.' "

Megan Tench can be reached at mtench@globe.com.