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As she’s documented in her books, Carrie Fisher has endured mental illness and substance-abuse problems, trials that would surely break a lesser human being. But it takes a truly strong sense of self to survive a cinnamon-bun hairdo. In this fleet, breezy one-woman show, Fisher proves she can stand up to any coif. She spends the first half riffing on her life in headlines, from the high-profile marriage and breakup of her parents, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, to her own ignominious couplings and uncouplings. She details, for example, the end of her second marriage, to Bryan Lourd, who claimed she had turned him gay by dosing him with codeine. (Pointing to a present-day photo of him, she muses, “Well, he had hair when I met him … I turn them bald, I make them gay, and my work is done.”)

Fisher has a light touch: Her zingers are sharp, but she always stops short of cruelty. (When Mike Todd, her father’s best friend and Liz Taylor’s husband, died in a plane crash, Eddie Fisher “flew to Elizabeth’s side—gradually making his way slowly to her front.”) She’s toughest on herself, and the show’s second half, focusing on her rehab and treatment for mental illness, veers close to self-help platitudes. But Fisher, padding around the stage in black silk pajamas, doesn’t stand still long enough to feel sorry for herself. At one point she even resurrects the Bunned One, donning a Princess Leia wig and taking us on a visual tour of Star Wars merchandising deals made in her image. “If someone offers to turn you into a pez dispenser,” she says, with understated sardonicism, “do it! Because it’s just made my life better.” — Stephanie Zacharek

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