Introduction

Abstract

These words end The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the 1985 play written by Jane Wagner, for which she won a New York Drama Desk Award, and was singled out for a seldom-given New York Drama Critics Special Award and performed countless times by Lily Tomlin, for which she won a Tony. Certainly the most significant of the projects Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner have created together, the ending produces the goose bump experience it describes for audience members, every time. At least it has for me every time I have seen Tomlin perform it, and judging from the feeling in the theater in my experience, it worked for the other spectators too. The play ran continually across the United States for most of the late 1980s, buoyed all the while by extraordinary reviews. They toured it again every year for extended runs from 1999 to 2003. They made a film version, released in 1991. The book of the script by Wagner was a New York Times bestseller, and a twenty-fifth anniversary edition was reissued in 2012.