signs’ language

Movies USA

A BAG LADY NAMED TRUDY narrates Jane Wagner's acclaimed comedy, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Her past "nuthouse" shock treatments rewired her brain, and now her umbrella hat is a satellite dish, enabling her to witness scenes from other people’s lives. Consequently, some aliens studying mankind befriend Trudy and sit in on her trances:

“I asked ’em,” Trudy says midway through the play, “‘You’ve learned a lot about us, but ... what do you think of people as a whole?’ They said they thought it would be an excellent idea.”

“It’s really an embrace of the species,” says Lily Tomlin, for whom the multicharacter, one-woman show was written (she plays Trudy and all those whose lives buzz through the umbrella: a punk performance artist, a pair of prostitutes, a sperm donor, and others). “A kind of sad embrace,” she continues, "but a loving embrace. Because, wherever we are on the evolutionary scale, there’s something base and something magnificent about us." Tomlin and longtime collaborator Wagner have adapted Signs for the screen, and the material is perfect for Tomlin, one of only a few American comic masters who intuitively reveal the pathos of comedy.

What’s base about mankind is, of course, our capacity for cruelty. As for evolution—as Trudy says, “You’d think by now evolution could’ve at least evolved us to the place where we could change ourselves.” And this is the problem Tomlin and Wagner address in Signs. Can we change, and how? The key lies in what makes us magnificent: goosebumps.

“How can strangers sit in a theater and respond in a similar way?” asks Tomlin. At a climactic moment, Trudy takes the aliens to the theater to experience goosebumps. They get goosebumps watching the audience get goosebumps from the play. “There’s no real explanation for why we get goosebumps. Why we can all have them in a given experience—that commonality, you know?” Tomlin believes that that "commonality" shows we are all basically humane, but we must nurture that "connectedness," that sympathy, to survive.

Society has become dangerously desensitized, she says in Signs ... and recent events have not been encouraging. Tomlin says with dismay, about the so-called patriotism surrounding the gulf war, “It’s too painful to think of what’s done in its name. Not to feel the sorrow but to celebrate. I was sort of horrified seeing bomber pilots slapping high fives. I guess to do such a thing, you’d have to think of it as some kind of sport, I don’t know what you’d do if you were really in touch with the pain and tragedy. So, the celebration is what benumbs us. There’s no sensitivity.”

The question then is: Can goosebumps compete with yellow ribbon blindfolds? “It would be great if people would embrace Signs to that degree ... but it might play to a broader audience than expected, because I think it dignifies people’s existence. You don’t know what the sum of someone’s mind is. I’d much rather they get the sweep of emotion, I’d rather they feel, even for thirty seconds, connected to everybody they’re sitting with. To feel some kind of common humanity, some kind of affection, that brief, fleeting affection.” +