It might seem logical to assume that the rise of the Trump administration is what pushed Lily Tomlin to return to the road with her entourage of characters and personas, allowing her to express and translate her shock and outrage at the current state of affairs. And it’s clear the president’s agenda, with its reverse momentum on progressive issues, rankles Tomlin, particularly his threatening moves toward eroding the rights of the LGBTQ+ community specifically and women in general.
And yet, while this has affected Tomlin, just as it has the majority of the country, it hasn’t made a significant impact on her stage show. For a rather familiar reason. “There’s a lot of topical stuff, in sort of a universal way, but I don’t do incredibly topical/political stuff,” says Tomlin — with her instantly recognizable laugh — in a recent phone call. “It’s hard to get something that doesn’t have a short shelf life. I watch Bill Maher every week and I love his commentary on almost everything. And I always think, ‘Well, that’s good he did that. I don’t need to.’ ”
Tomlin and her beloved characters — such as the haughty telephone operator Ernestine and the precocious 5-year-old Edith Ann — will all be on hand for her Thursday (Aug. 2) appearance at the Taft Theatre, a benefit for the Parkinson’s Disease Rehabilitation Institute.
Her comedy career might never have happened as we know it if she had been more dedicated to her first passion during her Detroit childhood. Instead, she might have been a magician. “I went to school with one of (former Detroit Tigers pitcher) Dizzy Trout’s kids,” she says. “I don’t remember his name, but he used to do magic tricks, and I immediately fell into the world of magic and loved it. I spent all my money going to Abbott’s Magic Shop and buying illusions. I didn’t spend any time training myself to do sleight of hand, it was just totally gratuitous. I’d just buy a trick.”
Tomlin’s early forays into magic may have ignited her interest in performing for an audience, but her instincts might nearly have derailed the biggest break of her nascent career in the late ’60s — joining the cast and becoming one of the shining lights of producer George Schlatter’s revolutionary television comedy program, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
“I almost didn’t do it,” Tomlin says. “I didn’t get a bid to go on the show until the third season, and I was already obligated to ABC to go on Music Scene, (a TV series) which was short-lived. My agent persuaded me to take the Laugh-In job. When I met George, he seemed to get me. Everybody I’d gone to before would press a button on their desk, and then someone would come in and say they had an urgent call.”
While Laugh-In was stocked with good comedians, Tomlin was clearly a comedic actor, someone who had a facility for creating vivid characters and inhabiting them rather than merely portraying them, speaking their outlandish truths with absolute conviction. Schlatter allowed her to develop a number of identities on Laugh-In, particularly her aforementioned signature characters, the officious and bureaucratic Ernestine and Edith Ann. They have become inextricably woven into the fabric of Tomlin’s career during the half century since their debut. She doesn’t mind a bit.
“Edith and Ernestine are sort of required, but I like to do them. I want to do them and I have decent material,” says Tomlin, running through the other “cast members” of her current show. “I do Mrs. Beasley and Lud and Marie, the Rubber Freak, and Chrissy at the gym. I do stories and talk to the audience; I use some video to satirize the show or me or the characters, in some way. It comments on the proceedings. It’s contextual.”
As with most causes in Tomlin’s life, her benefit performance for the PDRI has a personal slant. Her friends Allan and Sharon Marks, who she introduced to each other in junior high, have had their lives impacted by Parkinson’s and have used the services of the institute. It emphasizes strenuous exercise over more passive physical therapy.
Hopefully, Tomlin’s return visit to Cincinnati will turn out better than when she toured here with her Tony Award-winning show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Then, she got food poisoning from hotel shrimp and needed daily shots that were administered by a nurse with a piranha-skeleton necklace.
“That would put a person off normally, but I have an inclination for quirky things,” Tomlin says, understatedly.
She’s pursuing half a dozen career trajectories; she recently wrapped production on the fifth season of her popular Netflix series Grace and Frankie, which earned Tomlin an Emmy nomination (she’s won six to date), and she’s currently combining two of her creative disciplines — film and voiceover work — with her portrayal of Aunt May for the new animated Spider-Man movie.
Tomlin has no other film projects on the horizon, which is too bad because she needs an Oscar statuette to obtain EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) status.
However, she shouldn’t worry. She’s earned some of the most prestigious accolades in entertainment, including the 2003 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the 2014 Kennedy Center Honors and a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild last year. And she and wife Jane Wagner received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame five years ago.
Tomlin insists she isn’t leaving the road; she’s only backed away recently to accommodate her busy schedule. “I have done a little bit every year. I haven’t pulled out completely,” she says. “I love to perform, and I think my show is cohesive and good. My characters are timeless and I guess I’ll stop when they get bored.”
Lily Tomlin appears 8 p.m. Aug. 2 at Taft Theatre (317 E. Fifth St., Downtown). Tickets/more info: tafttheatre.org.
