STAGE REVIEW : Rediscovering Tomlin’s Art in ‘Intelligent’

Trudy’s back and Lily’s got her.

This isn’t just a flip way of telling you that Lily Tomlin has returned to town with what may be the last opportunity (lucky you) to see her one-woman “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” at the Wilshire Theatre.

It’s a flip way of letting on that under the laughs and the puzzled brow of that intergalactic bag lady, Trudy, is one of the wisest and most enlightened comedy shows to have come our way in decades.

Tomlin is not just a gloriously limber and terrific comedian. She also has a firm grasp on the truth that surrounds us and unsparingly informs her comedy with it. That’s genius--there, I’ve said it--and true grace, which she has in abundance, inside and out.

Notice the way she never loses track of who she is at the moment. First she’s Trudy, that homeless iconoclast who used to be a creative consultant (who do you think suggested orange and aqua to Howard Johnson’s?), but now consults strictly with those aliens from outer space in search of that intelligent life of the title.

Trudy’s got the New Age language down pat (living is “a bio-hazard” and her body a “bio-container”). Her office is her sleeves, covered in Post-Its (“I gotta get this data collated”). The rest of her apparel leaves something to be desired, hobbled as she is by panty hose she likes to wear rolled down to the ankles--and capped by the umbrella hat that serves as a dish to connect her to her “space chums.” “Goin’ crazy was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she ruminates. “Frankly, it came at a time when nothing else was working for me. . . .” And since reality is “nothing more than a collective hunch,” who needs it?

Flip doesn’t belong in a review of the gallery of precise characters we meet not exactly through Trudy, but somewhere in her widespread electromagnetic field. These are serious people with impairments we instantly recognize.

Take 15-year-old Agnus--her parents would love it if you would; they’ve changed the locks on her. This pink-haired punk rebel and aspiring performance artist is so heavily leathered and zippered and chained that she trips her grandparents’ electrified garage door whenever she approaches.

Agnus wants to be different, but so does everyone else. What’s a rebel to do? Scream and convince her grandparents they have a terrorist for a grandchild.

Take bored, affluent Kate (she just might enjoy that as a “different” experience), so bored that she finds somebody else’s lost suicide note an object of endless speculation. Imagine, losing a suicide note. The ultimate failure. The note could be Chrissy’s, the aerobics freak who’s so scared of everything else that she’d consider suicide. If only she wasn’t so scared.

Take Brandy and Tina (everyone else does). For fifty bucks a shot they’re happy to show you a good time. But Tina knows where to draw the line. The cruising screenwriter who picks them up and wants to turn on the tape recorder so he can use their chatter in his next script is where. Fifty dollars gets you fun, but hey, those are Brandy’s and Tina’s words . They could write their own script, thank you, and that’s gotta be worth a lot more than $50.

In the show’s longest and most penetrating segment, we revisit women’s lib via four women--Lyn, Marge, Edie and Pam--and a garage sale at which memories get discounted with the discarded mementos of a passing time. It is the evolution and devolution of a movement and a marriage--or rather two marriages, one heterosexual, the other homosexual.

This sequence has to be savored in the theater for its diversity, its astuteness, its wry humor and bittersweetness. “If I’d known having it all was going to be like this, I might have settled for less,” observes Lyn the feminist, wife, mother, executive and now jobless divorcee, who once lived by the golden rule: “Wear something around the neck that looks sort of like a scarf, sort of like a tie and sort of like a ruffle and doesn’t threaten anyone.”

Tomlin never misses a beat skipping from one character to another, one voice to another, one mind-set to another. She’s a thrill to watch and is flawlessly aided by a sound score (uncredited here, but last attributed to Bruce Cameron) that picks up on every mimed possibility: the sound of Agnus’ chains, of Trudy biting into an apple, of Lyn pulling the Kleenex out of a box.

Connections also are made among all the characters, and many of their lines, written by the equally ineffable Jane Wagner, are aphorisms that stand alone.

“It’s hard to be politically conscious and upwardly mobile at the same time,” says Lyn. “I am sick of being the victim of trends I reflect,” mutters Kate (or was it Chrissy?). “He listened with an intensity most people have only when talking,” says Lyn of her new-found future husband, Bob.

In the end, the field for witticisms reverts to Trudy, who makes quite a production throughout of distinguishing (not idly) between soup and art and philosophizing on nothing less than the meaning of life: “If life is meaningless, why bring up the subject? If life is meaningless, this discussion is even more so. This is so typical of what I do. . . .”

Tomlin is about to commit this fun and folly to film and insists that this is the show’s last hurrah on stage. If you haven’t seen it, here’s your chance. If you have, seeing it twice (as did this writer, who also caught it at the Doolittle Theatre in 1986) only deepens the experience.

At 8440 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; matinee Saturdays at 2 p.m. and Sundays at 3, until April 29. $15-$37.50; (213) 410-1062 or (714) 634-1300).