The Princess Diaries: Wishful Drinking @ Arena

Yes, Carrie Fisher is and has been many more things than the donut-braided, Vader-dissing, brother-kissing leader of the Rebel Alliance: A wearily graceful comedienne, a drug addict, a best-selling novelist, former spouse and muse to Paul Simon (not all the songs he wrote about her were nice), a sought-after script doctor, a proud mom, ex-wife of a man who left her for a man (not Simon; this one was Husband No. 2), joke-writer for the Academy Awards, and a recent recipient of electroconvulsive therapy for bipolar disorder. That's "recent" as in "a couple of months ago," or so she believes -- one of the side effects of ECT is short-term memory loss.

The farrago of dysfunction that is her life has been the stuff of comic self-explication before, notably in her 1987 debut novel, Postcards from the Edge. But one thing Fisher makes clear over the course of two hours that almost seem like they shouldn't whiz by as breezily as they do, given the heartbreak and addiction and death and all, is that her life hasn't gotten any less weird in the couple of decades since she published her book.

Fisher bares it all with the fearlessness that comes from knowing that the zingers she directs at herself in that thick, seen-it-all voice of hers are more lacerating than anything a heckler is likely to cough up. She's only a few minutes into her act when she invites the audience to ask her anything they want. On a good night, presumably, they do. (My crowd was a little on the timid side.)

Through segments such as the q&a session, and Fisher's liberal conscription of her audience, there's plenty of room for spontaneity in the show, which otherwise relies on a few major set pieces, as well as a major, well, set piece -- a trapezoid-shaped backdrop of "windows" that reveal themselves as video screens displaying photos and movie clips as needed. The best of the former, meanwhile, is "Hollywood Inbreeding 101," a familial-history-with-blackboard that could just as easily have been called "Six Two Degrees of Eddie Fisher." (There's a reason Carrie's dad called his autobiography Been There, Done That.) Long before Act Two finds the star doing the soft shoe to one of her ex-husband's songs, in her bathrobe, with a lit cigarette in her hand, you'll be glad you took this trip.

Wishful Drinking, presented by Arena Stage, is at the Lincoln Theatre at 1215 U St. NW through Sept. 28. The show runs approximately two hours, including one 15-minute intermission. Tickets are $71-$76, and are available here.