The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

The text of the Broadway play, captures the last twenty years of American culture

This play is Wagner's latest starring vehicle for Lily Tomlin, and it is a wonderfully comic and painful dose of truth direct to the heart. In this satire, a form all too lacking in American theater, Trudy the bag lady, Wagner's central character, tries to explain modern American material society to an alien (i.e., interstellar) committee. In the first act a variety of types are seen suffering in their lives. The more full of anxiety and terror they are, the funnier and more disturbing the play is. The focus of the second act, tied to the people of the first act, is a group of women who live through the social fads of the 1970s and 1980swomen trying to make something real enter their lives, but who live desperate and superficial existences. Yet the play ends with a hymn to the creative spirit. The text is lavishly illustrated with performance pictures. Required reading. Thomas E. Luddy, English Dept., Salem State Coll., Mass.
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