Fringe fest force of habit: Fixating on 'Star Wars' guides her personal growth

Victoria Montalbano as Princess Leia

I come to a show such as "The Princess Strikes Back" with an appropriate sense of intergalactic travel,

Me as Hopalong

cultural division. Any personal resonance of a pop-culture phenomenon upon my life faded after my Hopalong Cassidy phase in the early 1950s. 

What kind of immense imaginative journey awaited a man who had long since hung up his cap guns and holsters and in the 70 years since has found no other mass-marketed phenomenon to admire intensely or emulate?

To have a theater professional as polished and self-revealing as Victoria Montalbano thread "Star Wars" through her life as a teen and young woman, pursuing a strong interest in theater into her professional life, was my adventure into understanding people who forge iconic connections with fictional people. (I saved the illustrated booklet from the 1977 first run of the first film, free in the lobby in that largely pre-merch era, and seem to have misplaced it; I've seen none of the subsequent series.)

Maybe I've missed something crucial to completeness as a person in never having zeroed in on an icon. I'm not sure what conclusion I've come to, but Thursday night at the District Theatre I enjoyed her Indy Fringe Fest performance, which carries the mouth-filling subtitle "One Woman's Search for the Space Cowboy of Her Dreams." (She will do it here once more, at noon Saturday.)

The space cowboy, as those familiar with George Lucas megahit series know, is Han Solo, classically portrayed by the dashing Harrison Ford. Montalbano encountered the original "Star Wars" on its rerelease in 1997; she was 13 years old. Not surprisingly, there was some attempted identification with Princess Leia at first, which worked fitfully for a while. Drifting among secondary characters, some of them played by boyfriends — her recalled interaction as R2D2 with a fussy C-3P0 is hilarious — she knew that the Luke Skywalker types were never the ticket, but the restless Han Solo was a man to hang a dream on. 

Real-life connections tended to be on a less exalted plane, of course, and in the show Montalbano is unsparing in her narrative of struggle to gain a foothold in Chicago theater while achieving romantic satisfaction. Typically among memoirists, through time humor overlays experiences that were unsettling when they happened. Montalbano balances well the heartache and disappointment against the resilience that seems natural to her. Her capacity for amusement is richly shared with the audience.

As a one-woman show, "The Princess Strikes Back" is notable for the quality of the writing and the energy and pacing of the delivery. Montalbano is conversational in manner, but the style is neat and engaging. She never falls into the error of thinking that to exude charm these days requires being offhand or even sloppy in word or gesture. 

The pop-culture engagement that shaped her personality is presented as something that served her well, just as the multi-decade voyages of the "Star Wars" series have made their beneficial mark on the zeitgeist. She clearly recognizes that whatever symbols we hang onto as we pursue our own paths, with luck we draw from those connections just what we need to give zest and style to our real selves.

[Montalbano photo by Sarah Elizabeth Larson; Harvey photo by Margaret Felton Harvey]