Lily Tomlin Brings New Life to ‘Universe’

Lily Tomlin, rushed, is on the line.

“It’s me, Lily, finally,” she says. “I’m late.”

Tomlin is calling from Easton, Pa., city No. 21 on her 30-city revival tour of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” The 1985 one-woman Broadway play earned Tomlin a Tony Award for her multi-character performance, a tour de force whose guiding light is Trudy, the certifiably mad but oddly wise bag lady.

Tomlin’s tour takes her to Costa Mesa--city No. 27--for two nights at Segerstrom Hall in the Orange County Performing Arts Center beginning Friday. The tour ends Dec. 11 in Tucson with a possible resumption in the new year.

Tomlin, who had performed in New Brunswick, N.J., the night before, didn’t realize how pressed for time she’d be the morning of the interview. It was a travel day, after all, and what with breakfast and packing, there wasn’t much time to talk. So after a brief conversation she promised to call back as soon as she rolled into Easton.

“It’s not far, just 50 miles or something like that,” she had said after switching to the speaker phone so she could continue talking while closing her suitcase before the bellboy arrived.

Tomlin and her three traveling companions--her longtime stage manager, a new sound engineer and the tour manager--drove to Easton in the van that carries the production’s sound equipment.

They are staying not in the usual hotel but in “a great little inn” with a parlor and dining room and “very sweet” rooms. The innkeeper set out coffee and coffee cake for them.

“It’s like going to your aunt’s house,” Tomlin says, clearly pleased with the arrangements and the prospect of having the day off with her tour mates. “We’ll probably go to the movies tonight or something.”

Tomlin, 60, who first gained fame on TV’s “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” 30 years ago, says she’s actually managed to fly home to Los Angeles three times since the tour started Sept. 30 in Austin, Texas.

“But now we’re sort of down in a crunch,” she said. “I’d been doing two or three nights a week; now I’m doing four or five a week.”

Written by longtime Tomlin collaborator Jane Wagner, the play has been described as a travelogue of the latter half of the 20th century. The social odyssey is narrated by the philosophical Trudy, who’s given to speaking to space aliens who have come to study “a planet in puberty.”

The time-traveling Trudy’s “trances” conjure up a host of characters: from Kate (the bored socialite) to Tina and Brandy (two New York hookers); and from Paul (the one-time swinger, sometime sperm donor) to Lyn (the feminist, whose husband is the ideal mate: “He was the only man I ever met who knew where he was when Sylvia Plath died”).

After the play’s original one-year run on Broadway, Tomlin did another year at the Doolittle Theatre in Los Angeles, followed by shorter runs in several other cities.

Except for occasionally performing at benefits, Tomlin hasn’t been onstage much in recent years. She’s devoted most of the ‘90s to doing movies (most recently “Tea With Mussolini”) and television (two years on “Murphy Brown” and three animated Edith Ann specials for which she won a Peabody Award).

But last June she and Wagner were invited to a theater workshop for drama students at USC where Tomlin dusted off “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”

Tomlin, who hadn’t performed the play since doing the film version in 1991, found that it was as “good, funny and moving as it always was.” She had planned to do a stand-up concert tour this fall, “but when ‘The Search’ seemed so great and viable, I thought I’d much rather do ‘The Search.’ It’s a much richer, beautiful experience.”

Although Tomlin works onstage with only two chairs, a stool and a three-step stairway, she obviously got the touring show together rather quickly.

“Yeah, you know, it lives in my body,” jokes Tomlin, who actually plays 13 characters in the show “if you count Lily.”

It’s during her brief appearance as “herself” after the time-traveling Trudy flashes on her performing on a theater stage that Tomlin utters one of the play’s most memorable lines: “I worry no matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”

Tomlin says audiences on the tour have been “incredibly responsive” to the play, which has undergone only a few minor changes. (In one addition, “Lily” addresses moving into the new millennium by saying, “I don’t know about you, but I’m not packed.”)

No matter how many performances she does, Tomlin says, she never grows tired of portraying Trudy and company.

“It’s like a piece of music. I want to play it so well that the audience gets it the way I know it can be got. If I fail that, then I’m bereft. But the play is so strong, I can even be a little off. And when I’m soaring and really in the play I’m excited because I’m going somewhere.”

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Lily Tomlin will perform in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. $36-$49. (714) 556-2787.