Carrie Fisher and the Donut Shop, Both in a Matter of Days

My neighbor/pal Jessica got me discounted tickets to two different shows in the past week: “Wishful Drinking” on Sunday and “Superior Donuts” last night. Nothing like a little Broadway to get me feeling autumnal.
Going in, I was pretty sure that the donuts, as conjured up by playwright Tracy Letts, would be my favorite. But having seen the two shows, now I’m not so sure. Because I had forgot to factor in something significant: Carrie Fisher rocks.
I read “Wishful Thinking” as a book, and I learned something interesting: “Wishful Thinking” is not much of a book. It reads like a show script, which did not keeping it from selling well. Still, as I made my way through what sometimes seemed like a forced series of sarcastic asides, I found myself thinking the book would probably be better as a performance piece. It is. It’s an excellent performance piece, with more than a few pertinent points about the danger of keeping secrets and taking the long road to finding mental health. Fisher is such a likable presence, mixing warmth and wit with the aforementioned sarcasm. She becomes a perfect tour guide for her story of the hazards of fame, her bipolar disorder and the time she woke up next to her friend’s dead body. The child of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (and armed with hilarious stories about both of them), Carrie Fisher even begins and ends with a musical interlude. And she’s good enough to leave me with dreams of her doing a nightclub act with her mom.
My favorite moment in the second act was snappy and fantastic. The show’s winding down and then we hear a siren. “Shit, that’s my ride,” Fisher says. My only complaint is that “Wishful Drinking” could be done in 90 minutes without an intermission, but I feel the same way about everything.
“Superior Donuts” tries to do something more ambitious than Fisher does, more communal and less personal. These “Donuts” take the temperature of a culture, while also telling a specific story about a shop uptown in the Windy City. Michael McKeon takes center stage, but almost unwillingly. I’ve never seen anyone underplay as much as he does as the shop owner in the first act of “Superior Donuts.” This turns out to be an unlikely and calm play, at least in that it comes from the author of the electric “August: Osage County.”
There are weaknesses, and they are not pretty. The characters are types more than three-dimensional and believable representations, and there’s a poorly choreographed fight scene that looks exactly like a poorly choreographed fight scene in a play. The acting is so good, though, that sometimes the caricatures come alive. A few powerful moments happen, making this a worthy destination.
It’s funny, too. Indeed “Superior Donuts” has been derided as a sitcom, which is usually a sign that I will love a show. This time around, I loved the sense of community and the set and the play’s predictable but well-played final moments. But this particular sitcom left me a tiny bit hungry for something more substantial, like maybe Carrie Fisher alone on a stage, just chatting about how wacky life can be.