Let a Hundred Lilys Bloom the Search for Signs of Intelligent

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Theater began with one actor in a mask playing all the parts, relying on his imagination and the audience's. The modern one-person show blends that ancient Greek bravado with the calculated emotional exposure of the stand-up comic. The soloist, unmasked, tells the audience what is about to take place, shaping its reactions, soliciting its affection and implying that the customers are helping create the event rather than passively watching it. In this atmosphere, when the audience applauds some line of dialogue, it is hailing its own perspicacity as well as the actor's. The weakness of Lily Tomlin's one-woman show, which opened on Broadway last week, is that it eventually indulges in just such a fawning congratulation of the ticket holders. The show's strength is that for most of the way it is an acerbic send-up of the current national selfishness, coupled with a knowing and ungooey lament for the loss of '60s innocence. It is hard not to like a show that says, "I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain." Almost anyone can be touched by the folly and sweetness of a man who wears a T shirt reading WHALES, SAVE US. And who can disagree with the observation "What goes up must come down. But don't expect it to come down where you can find it--Murphy's Law applied to Newton's."

Tomlin won a 1977 Tony Award for her one-woman show Appearing Nitely. Both that comic montage and The Search for Signs were written and directed by Jane Wagner, who also collaborated with Tomlin on three Grammy-nominated record albums, four Emmy-honored TV specials and the film The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Wagner has developed a shrewd ear for Tomlin's inflections and an uncluttered directing style that takes full advantage of the star's arms- outflung exuberance and her adroitness at shifting from character to character, place to place, reality to fantasy and back. Here Tomlin plays a baker's dozen of ill-assorted characters, from an uncommonly well-read bag lady to a neurotically self-dramatizing and spiteful 15-year-old. The gallery includes two gentle prostitutes, a trendy matron, three feminists reminiscing about the glory days of the movement, and an entire down-home household in Greenwood, Ind. Some of these people and their situations are the predictable stuff of sitcoms, and at moments the show makes fun of easy targets. Tomlin seems determined to find something sympathetic in each character, yet often defers such revelations until the obvious humor has been exhausted. Still, the self-examinations can be potent: the spiteful teenager closes the first act with a blazing speech about how she would like to emulate the indifference to pain of her "hero," G. Gordon Liddy, but she cannot deny the agony of thrusting her hand, or her soul, into a flame.

Almost all of the people intersect in some way. But these conjunctions, meant to be an inspirational example of how all mankind is bound together, can sometimes seem forced and almost irrelevant.

Tomlin's most appealing impersonation remains Trudy the Bag Lady, who talks with aliens from outer space and wears pantyhose rolled down as though they were leg irons, but who knows exactly what is going on when she mocks gene splicing and pop art, or explains the virtues of the umbrella hat. The most poignant sequence is a reminiscence by a woman who is selling her home and its contents after the breakup of her marriage to what seemed to be a sensitive, feminist man. The piece is at once an unabashed defense of human-potential movements and a candid acceptance of their limits. Even the less ambitious, more conventional sketches contain lines to cherish. Perhaps the signature for the evening is an observation that in a time of national obsession with health, "I worry that we don't have a metaphysical-fitness program." For that lack, Tomlin's show is at least a partial cure. It is a buoying search for signs of intelligent life in the theater.