Wishful Drinking and Othello

On Tuesday night, Missy, Nate, and I saw Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher's highly entertaining one-woman show at Studio 54. Fisher was very funny and utterly charming on stage. She blew off most of her fans at the stage door, though, so major points off to girlfriend for that. She signed only a handful of autographs and posed for one photo before being whisked away in a waiting car. *sigh*

Once it got rolling, and it didn't take long, I enjoyed every minute of the show, especially the inside-Hollywood stuff about Fisher's family, including her parents' new spouses/lovers and their offspring; the outside-Hollywood folksy wisdom of her Texan maternal grandmother; and the stories about George Lucas and the blockbusters that made her masturbation material for millions of teenage boys. (A quick bit of Star Wars trivia: Christopher Walken was seriously considered for the role of Han Solo. Yikes.) Even though she's had a very difficult life, particularly being hospitalized for treatment of manic-depression, there's not a moment where she plays her past for sympathy; she's looking only for laughs.

If you plan to see this show, don't read anything about it until after you've gone, because too many writers like to give away the best lines in their articles. For example, Amy Larocca in New York magazine. And Doug Sturdivant in Playbill. I wish I could have heard the punch lines that they gave away during the show instead of reading them in the publications they work for.

***

When I saw Othello at NYU's Skirball Center with Eugene last month, two days before its official opening, I wasn't thinking, "This is a train wreck." It was certainly unusual, what with Othello and Desdemona's bed being constructed out of small television screens; the casting of African-Americans in several roles, none of which was the title character, about whom much, of course, is made in the text of the play of* his blackness; and the roles of Bianca, the whore, and Montano, the governor of Cypress, being performed as the same person by the same actress in the same costume. And then there were the attempted-rape scene; the not-just-in-Iago's-head affair between Othello and Iago's wife, Emilia; the stretches in which the military characters drink bottled beer on folding chairs in a bar; the flurry of communication between characters on mobile phones at the beginning of the show; and the too transparent evilness of Iago—played in a green polo shirt by a doughy Philip Seymour Hoffman—that had me scratching my head and wondering why everyone wasn't on to him by now. If it had been a movie I was watching on DVD, I'd have wanted to yell at the screen: "Emilia, can't you see that your husband is scheming to have your lord kill your lady? Stop him all fucking ready, you dumb ass!"

Maybe it's because I don't feel terribly qualified to criticize Shakespeare productions. Or maybe it was my desire to like what the generally good cast was performing—and a show that my friend was treating me to. But I gave the director, Peter Sellars, the benefit of the doubt that he knew what he was doing. Given all the reservations I had, I shouldn't have done that.

Other reviewers certainly haven't had a problem trashing the show. The New York Times's Ben Brantley called the production "exasperatingly misconceived." And under the clever headline "It's Lost Its Moorings," New York magazine's Scott Brown says that none of Sellars's "potentially incendiary concepts made it out of his brain alive." Ouch. And my new buddy Lou, whom I'll write more about in my next food-and-drink post, showed his displeasure with his feet when he saw the play a couple of weeks ago. He left at intermission because he figured there were better ways to spend the rest of his evening than watching the second act of this Othello.

*That's a lot of "of"s in one sentence. But it all seems grammatical to me. And I should know. :-)

Comments

[Paul]

I've been dying to see the Carrie Fisher show. I guess now I need to make sure I do it! Thanks for the review!

[David]

I've heard from plenty of folks who ARE qualified to criticize a Shakespeare production and they HATED it.