ERNESTINE IN OUTER SPACE : TOMLIN ADDS COMIC TOUCH TO ‘NOVA’

“Earth to Lily Tomlin. Earth to Lily Tomlin: Are there signs of intelligent life in the universe?”

Tomlin addresses that theme nightly in her one-woman show, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” which she’s now performing on stage here at the Doolittle Theatre after winning a Tony Award as best actress in the play during a successful 13-month run on Broadway.

On Tuesday, she looks at the universe more scientifically on a PBS “Nova” segment titled “Is Anybody Out There?” (8 p.m. Channels 28 and 15, 9 p.m. Channel 50). She’s the host-narrator, and also involves her ringy-dingy telephone operator, Ernestine, in the program that travels in scope from the alien encounters of Hollywood fiction to NASA’s deep space probes.

What is a Broadway actress-comedienne doing hosting a scientific program on public television?

“The idea was probably to make the show more acceptable and maybe add a little comedy to it,” Tomlin said this week at a screening of the program at KCET. She duly noted that both she and her collaborator, Jane Wagner, who wrote “Search for Signs,” are “Nova” fans, “so we were pretty thrilled when they asked us to be part of it. We thought it was great identification for us.”

The feeling apparently was mutual in the “Nova” camp. Commented the segment’s producer and co-writer Geoffrey Haines-Stiles: “What’s so great about their stage play is that they’ve taken incredibly serious ideas that you normally find in physics reviews and served them up in a way that is totally acceptable. It’s funny as well as being thoughtful and insightful.”

That, said Haines-Stiles, was also the “character” he was after in dealing with the complex ideas put forth on his “Nova” segment.

And complex the hour often is. There are references to cosmic surveys, theories, megahertz, molecules, billions of stars, thousands of galaxies, the Mega-channel Extra-Terrestrial Assay and so forth. It’s not the easiest material to comprehend.

However, the complexity is also reduced to simplicity in one sequence that shows just how difficult it is to make contact with “other beings.” Two men are pictured on opposite sides of a vast canyon, each wondering if there is anyone else “out there.”

They independently try various means of making contact: yelling, lighting campfires, sending smoke signals. Then, even with a simple walkie-talkie, the chances of connecting are shown to be remote, requiring that one must be listening at the exact moment the other is sending. The illustration vividly makes the point of how complicated is the search when scientists are probing the vastness of space.

Haines-Stiles conceded that “there’s a lot of hard scientific material” in the program. “We’re almost on the edge of what I think you want to know about wave lengths. But I think viewers will stick with it because Lily as Ernestine ties it together and is interactively involved in the program.”

As for Tomlin, does she believe in alien beings and UFOs? “I’ve put out the vibration that I’m willing to be contacted . . . but I’ve had no takers,” she quipped. Added Wagner: “I’ve seen some people I know are from outer space, but how they got here, I don’t know.”

More seriously, Tomlin said, “I felt less confident after ‘Nova’ that there is anybody really close in our galaxy, and I was disheartened to find out that we may not make contact very quickly. At the same time, just paring it down and making it reasonable and rational makes it deeper in some way.

“I’d like to think there are things like the bar in ‘Star Wars.’ I like all the fanciful, magical stuff.”

Meanwhile, Tomlin will go about her nightly “Search for Signs” on stage. She mentioned that she’ll probably take the show to London and possibly back to Broadway later. And, rather surprisingly, she said, “A French actress wants to do it in Paris. An Italian actress wants to do it in Rome. A Czech actress wants to do it in Prague. I can’t quite imagine how it would be, but it would be fun to see.”

To date, however, there have been no requests from actresses on Mars, Jupiter, Venus or Pluto asking for permission to play “Search” there. Anyway, that’s probably one road tour Tomlin would want to play herself.