Tomlin brings a cast of meaningful characters to life

Alex Coolman

Several months ago, Lily Tomlin was talking with some students at

USC, showing them a few of the characters she made famous in her Broadway

shows like “Appearing Nitely” and “The Search for Signs of Intelligent

Life in the Universe.”

She did Trudy the Bag Lady, she did Chrissy the self-improvement nut,

she did Paul the burnout -- comic creatures who won her a Tony the first

time “Search” was on Broadway in the ‘80s. The students’ reaction, in

some respects, was frustrating: the kids had never heard of these

characters.

But at the same time the response was rewarding. Tomlin realized that

Trudy and Chrissy and Paul seemed just as alive and as entertaining as

they ever had been.

“They just responded to it so well,” Tomlin said. “The play seemed as

funny and moving as ever.”

The experience encouraged Tomlin to bring “Search” back on the road.

She will be performing it Dec. 3 and 4 at the Orange County Performing

Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

The show, which originally opened in 1985, is performed entirely by

Tomlin. But, as her fans know, a one-woman show from this actress is like

a play stocked with an almost endless variety of eccentric, challenging

characters.

“Search” was penned by Jane Wagner, a writer Tomlin has worked with

since 1971 on features such as “The Incredible Shrinking Woman” and

“Appearing Nitely.” The two women collaborated on directing and

developing the characters. But it is Tomlin’s elastic features and

remarkable ability to be possessed by the spirit of a young child or a

crotchety telephone operator -- an ability that once drew comparisons to

comic Richard Pryor -- that brings the cast of “Search” to life.

Trudy the bag woman is the oddball narrator of the evening, a

character whose slightly demented take on contemporary society is

intended to conceal a penetrating insight.

“Trudy was a designer and a creative consultant in corporate America,”

Tomlin explained. “In her job she innovated lots of questionable things.

She developed laugh tracks because she heard voices when nobody was

there.”

She also came up with the notion of selling the idea of “munching” to

the third world, Tomlin said.

“It’s like an untapped market,” she explained, seeming to slip into

character almost instantly. “The idea of eating between meals just never

occurred to them.”

Trudy was also a character in “Appearing Nitely,” but Tomlin says she

has grown more complicated as she has aged.

“She’s developed into a much richer character,” Tomlin said. “She’s

just a much more conscious, more more evolved character.”

To some extent, this development has to do with the evolution of

Tomlin’s outlook on things.

“I identify with all the characters,” Tomlin said. “I think all actors

do. You find in yourself some part of you to flesh out the characters.”

But the characters Tomlin “does” have long seemed to have distinct

personalities of their own, perhaps because Tomlin goes so deeply into

them. Figures like Ernestine, the nasal telephone operator from

“Laugh-In,” or the relentlessly prim Mrs. Beasley, seem almost like

spirits that occupy Tomlin’s malleable body.

“Search,” with a cast of characters that ranges across the spectrum of

social classes and states of mental well-being, is ideally suited to

Tomlin’s chameleon-like talents of transformation.

“This is a form of theater that I’ve loved since I was a child,”

Tomlin said. “Being able to play many roles without anything except the

body and your voice. Going on a trip and hopefully taking the audience

with you.”

As Tomlin pointed out, her characters, though comic, are never wholly

contemptible. They are, especially in “Search,” fairly confused people,

but their intentions are essentially good.

“Chrissy,” for example, runs from one self-improvement project to the

next, a victim of advertising culture and a shallow notion of what it

means to be “successful.”

“She says ‘I always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have

been more specific,”’ Tomlin joked.

As Tomlin plays her, though, Chrissy is shown to have a certain

integrity. The explanation for her problems seems to lie less in her own

personality than in the shallow culture she consumes.

“She’s rather deep in her searching,” Tomlin said. “She has a good

soul.”

This unwillingness to sacrifice the dignity of the people she portrays

and the social critique that underlies the comedy go hand in hand.

Tomlin has long been politically outspoken. She once refused to appear

on “Laugh In” with the politically conservative Martha Mitchell, the wife

of Richard Nixon’s attorney general, and stormed off the set of the Dick

Cavett Show when a guest referred to his wife as his property.

The array of damaged figures that populates “Search” is testament to

her concern both with the unhealthiness of contemporary culture and the

partial failure of “progressive” forces to remedy those ills.

But Tomlin is interested in the links between people as well as the

forces that divide them.

“All these people are just sort of interconnnected,” she said. “It’s

really about us as a species.”

FYI

WHAT: Lily Tomlin in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the

Universe”

WHERE: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa

Mesa

WHEN: Dec. 3 and 4, 8 p.m.

HOW MUCH: $36 to $49

TELEPHONE: (714) 556-2122