Ask any theater lover what she missed during the 2020–2021 shutdown and the answer probably isn’t any particular show, song, or performer. In all likelihood, it’s the experience: “a group of strangers sitting together in the dark, laughing the crying about the same things,” as Trudy (played by Cecily Strong) says in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, now at The Shed off-Broadway. Jane Wagner may have written that line nearly 40 years ago—when the one-woman show was first performed so memorably by Lily Tomlin—but never have the words been truer, or more deeply felt.
Bag lady, street philosopher, and extraterrestrial liaison Trudy is just the first of nearly a dozen characters played by Saturday Night Live veteran Strong. Among the others: herself; Chrissy, a career-disoriented “seminar hopper”; rebellious teenage punk performance artist Agnus Angst; bored housewife Lonnie (“I am sick of being the victim of trends I reflect but don’t even understand,” she complains of her extremely asymmetrical hairdo); “health nut by day” and “cokehead by night” Paul; chatty prostitutes Brandy and Tina; and feminist friends and self-described sisters Lyn, Edie, and Marge, who are passionate about women’s equality and passing the ERA. For those who know the original script intimately: Wagner—who serves as executive producer along with Tomlin—has updated and trimmed the text to a taut 90 minutes, excising a few characters along the way. So you won’t get to see Strong as a formerly “semi-nonorgasmic woman” selling Good Vibrations products, aka “Hamburger Helper for the boudoir.” Also gone are the dated—or nostalgic, depending on your point of view—references to Howard Johnson’s and fried clams.
Strong—in a winning New York stage debut—and director Leigh Silverman (Grand Horizons) wisely resist the temptation to make Trudy a caricature; she’s actually pretty relatable for a woman whose coat is lined with Post-its. (She and her “space chums”—a “kinda cosmic fact-finding committee”—are trying to make sense of life on Earth. Good luck with that!) “You people look at my cart, call me crazy ’cause I save this junk,” she says. “What should we call the ones who buy it?” Point: Trudy.
But the determined-to-have-it-all Lyn is the character we spend the most time with—particularly after she meets Birkenstock-wearing, Samadhi flotation tank–building Bob. (“He had a post-psychedelic air about him like somebody who’s reading Gurdjieff and the Tibetan Book of the Dead,” she sighs dreamily.) They get married and have hyperactive twin boys. She takes assertiveness training; he takes sensitivity classes. Yet her supposedly feminist husband expects her to “be organic, holistic, learn millet recipes, make beet juice, wait around for sourdough to rise.” And work. And make costumes for the kids’ ecology pageant. “How naive,” Lyn reflects later, “to think there was a time when we actually thought we were going to change the system.”
That sourdough reference, incidentally, is not an update. Equal pay, the ERA—all the things Lyn and her friends marched and rallied for…still works in progress. Did Wagner have any idea that all these years later The Search would be so relevant?
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe opened Jan. 11, 2022, at The Shed and runs through Feb. 6. Tickets and information: theshed.org
