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LILY TOMLIN ON HER WAY TO BROADWAY, written and produced by Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin. Additional material by Cynthia Buchanan, Lorne Michaels, Patricia Resnick, Jim Rusk and others. Staged by George Boyd and Jane Wagner. At the Wilbur Theater, Boston.
Everybody loves Lily Tomlin. Take, for example, Mrs. Judith Beasley of Calumet City, Illinois. She happened to be in New York City chaperoning her hometown high school’s senior trip when the box office opened for Lily’s Broadway debut,
Appearing Nitely. Remembering that Lily had packed the school gym on her last swing through Calumet City, Mrs. Beasley took it upon herself to express her town’s gratitude by setting up a first aid station outside the Biltmore Theatre to dispense hot coffee and tissues to the weather-beaten ticket-buyers.
Mrs. Beasley, who doesn’t get a lot of enjoyment out of life, recently went out of her way to provide her selfless service to the beloved Ms. Tomlin on the occasion of her road show opening in Boston. Just minutes before the show began, Mrs. B could be seen mopping the Wilbur stage and applying her vacuum cleaner and whisk-broom to the sparsely furnished set so that everything would be spic and span for the special event. Of course, it was actually Lily Tomlin who embodied this and the many other characters who cropped up in
Lily Tomlin on Her Way to Broadway, the Grand Hotel
of one-person shows.
Alone on the stage with no props and all her resourcefulness, Tomlin was quick to delineate the adversary relationship between her approach and the traditional standup-comic routine. Funny as she was, Tomlin steadfastly refused to round off her characterizations with punchlines. And she devoted a portion of the program to a series of one-liners (“I went to six different stores looking for a can of rat hairs and animal impurities, and every one I found had tuna fish in it”) which she delivered lying flat on the floor.
The more than two dozen characters in Tomlin’s current repertoire commanded the Wilbur stage from a few seconds up to half an hour, and their sources varied. Several sketches were explicitly autobiographical: Tomlin’s infatuation with her second-grade teacher, Miss Sweeney (“I didn’t think of myself as the teacher’s pet – I just had nothing in common with a bunch of seven-year-old illiterates”); the vicarious fulfillment through Mildred the HoJo honcho, of Tomlin’s dreams of becoming a star waitress. Most of the characters had been developed through observation and improvisation; others, such as Crystal the militant quadriplegic, reflected some technical research. The only unoriginal character was Fortune Dundy, the professional virgin apotheosized in Cynthia Buchanan’s novel
Maiden.
Tomlin’s material finds its closest analogue in Jules Feiffer’s cartoons. Like Feiffer’s characters, Tomlin’s elicit a shock of recognition at embarrassing episodes, devastating details (right down to the red plastic
two-lovebirds- on-a-stick barrette). However, whereas the laconic cartoonist examines the everyday urban angst of the “yoo-man” condition, Tomlin often ventures boldly into the extreme, the distasteful, the potentially dangerous. The wheelchair-bound Crystal, for instanced, could be a heavy-handed cry of “I’m a person, too” or just a sick joke. But Tomlin’s character is a brilliantly cheerful creation. In her CB-equipped Iron Duchess, Crystal “the Terrible Tumbleweed” is on her way to go hang-gliding off Big Sur. She remarks of her physical limitations and the timid reactions of others: “Thank God, kids never mean well. I’m at an amusement park and they ask me, ‘Are you a ride?’” Tomlin also carries on a running critique of her monologue. “Boo, hiss,” she quips out of the side of her mouth. “Too graphic! Crippled girl talks hostile? Give me Easter Seals! Well, I say to you,
eat my dust!”
The most difficult segment of the evening was about a “Sixties Person”; this 25-minute sketch follows a teenager through every counter-cultural cliché, from go-go boots to Cesar Chavez, of the last 15 years (“Janie, Paul’s dead! He’s the only one barefoot on the
Abbey Road cover!”). The piece resembles Rona’s section in Robert Patrick’s
Kennedy’s Children and teeters perilously on the edge of the obvious. “What’s your sign? Oh God, I knew it! Pisces just blow me away!” But its stupefying banality is so overwhelming, its pageant of buzzwords so deadly accurate, that it eventually becomes a thunderbolt of self-discovery.
Even this talent for developing true-to-life material in the various dictions and dialects it demands is eclipsed by Tomlin’s sheer acting ability. One of her best bits was a placid domestic scene involving Lud and Marie and young Lily Tomlin. Marie is cutting out recipes and pasting them on 3x5 cards. Lud is eating cake and reading the paper, and the two of them elaborate to Pinter proportions a discussion of the merits of different cake flavors. It was breathtaking to watch how deftly Tomlin switched characters:
cutting-and- pasting became cake-eating-and-page-turning in one slightly, continuous motion. This virtuosic fluidity is crucial to the show’s unorthodox structure, wherein self-contained character pieces, TV commercials, amorphous transitional comments and indefinable sketches are made to cohere solely by Tomlin’s theatrical clarity.
There’s no space here to do more than mention audacious characters like 77-year-old evangelist Sister Boogie Woman and Rick, the macho singles-bar habitué; or to dwell on Tomlin’s love-hate affair with television or the fact that her show apparently drops and adds characters every night. Only this: Lily Tomlin’s people stir us so deeply because we sense that somewhere in that woman’s soul each of these characters lives and breathes. Watching Tess the street lady clamber onstage to peddle her potholders out of a grimy Filene’s bag reminded me of Tomlin’s first words at a recent press luncheon at Joseph’s. Breezing in and dropping her gear on a vacant chair, she turned to a nearby waiter and muttered, “Watch my purse!”
Boston Phoenix, 1977
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