THE FRENCH ALSO HAVE A SMASH HIT CALLED ‘LILY’

While Broadway flocks to see Lily Tomlin in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” Paris lines up to see another Lily.

It’s a new comedy by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy entitled “Lily et Lily.” Variety’s man in Paris calls it “a slam-bang French farce to which audiences react as though under a laughing gas attack.”

The setting is Hollywood in the 1930s. The story concerns a movie queen who is always getting into the tabloids and her shy twin sister, visiting from the provinces. One day the prudish sister has to dress up as the movie star, and you can take it from there.

Jacquelline Maillan, France’s top comedienne, plays both Lilies, and Variety notes that “the dual role fits her like a glove, but is open for others to try on.” Carol Channing or Liza Minnelli, for instance.

Or Lily Tomlin?

El Teatro Campesino had a great success with two Luis Valdez plays recently at the New York Public Theatre’s Latino Festival--”Dark Root of a Scream” (1964) and “Soldado Razo” (1970).

Writing in the Village Voice, Michael Feingold found the first overwrought, but the second “a masterpiece of its kind--all lightness and simplicity: a bare stage, basic costumes and lighting, comic events, an easy relationship with the audience, words that directly express the feelings of ordinary people. This country urgently needs such art again.”

The dual bill might play well at the Public Theatre’s Los Angeles equivalent, the new L.A. Theatre Center.

The Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center is reading scripts (stage and television) for its annual Playwrights Conference, to be held June 29-July 27 in Waterford, Conn. Scripts must be original, must not have been previously produced and must be received by Dec. 1. A short biography of the playwright is also required, and a stamped self-addressed envelope if you want your play back. Address: 234 W. 44th St., Suite 901, New York, N.Y. 10036.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Julian Beck of the Living Theatre (1925-1985), writing to a friend from Europe 20 years ago: “We need to be free to work and here we have found some kind of life which makes this possible. Perhaps simply being aliens in a world too bound by chauvinist sentiments is important.”