Lily Tomlin: Still Full of Intelligent Life

Lily Tomlin contains multitudes – and more than five decades into her performing career, she continues to rejoice in bringing her classic characters to audiences.

“I do about 40-50 dates a year,” says the tireless Tomlin, who will present an evening with Edith Ann, Ernestine, Trudy the bag lady, and more Friday at the Valley Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles, followed by dates in other Western cities and on an Olivia cruise in May and June.

The show, An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin, features the characters in some new roles for the 21st century: Edith Ann plays around with iPods and social media, while since the end of AT&T’s telephone monopoly, Ernestine has gone to work for an insurance company, where she denies health care procedures to customers in her inimitable fashion. It includes some video footage as well, making it a multimedia event.

Performing onstage, Tomlin says, “is just more intimate, more direct, more personal” than film or TV, although she’s excelled in those mediums as well. She’s currently making a movie, which she declines to reveal information about, and she’s set to do a Netflix comedy series that will reunite her with friend and Nine to Five costar Jane Fonda.

In the series, Grace and Frankie, Fonda and Tomlin play the respective title characters, wives of law partners who’ve been thrown together because of their husbands’ business but don’t particularly like each other. Then they find out their husbands have been lovers for many years, and the longtime rivals have to adjust to the changes in their lives at an age when most people expect everything to be settled.

“Jane is really interested in that whole time of life – women striving to make their third act their best,” Tomlin says. Created by Marta Kauffman of Friends fame, the series was developed around the two stars. “I’m looking forward to it,” Tomlin says.

Tomlin isn’t one to shy away from life’s challenges. “I always like a left turn,” she says. “That’s probably the risk-taker in me.”

The challenge of performing onstage is a little less daunting than it once was, she says, but “you still get excited or nervous. You want it to be wonderful and worth the audience’s time.”

Tomlin’s partner in art and life has for many years been Jane Wagner, who writes much of her material. The key to making their professional and personal relationship work? “I think we just get each other, respect each other.” Tomlin says. “She makes me laugh. She can just be hilarious.”

The two were married last New Year’s Eve. Tomlin expresses amazement at the recent progress in marriage equality and LGBT rights in general. “I’ve been dumbfounded in the last 20 years or so,” she says. She’s hopeful that progress will continue, but she knows it’s not a given.

“The wrong people can take it all away from you,” she cautions. “It’s important to keep the right people in office and try to elect even more inclusive and progressive people.”

She aims for her comedy to be inclusive as well. She wants audiences “to be entertained, to be moved, to see the commonality between everyone – to laugh at the human race, not some particular group,” she says. Her stage show, she says, is “like an aesthetic roller coaster,” edgy in some places, tender in others. “You want it to be,” she says, “as full of human experience as you can make it.”

Tomlin will present An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin at 8 p.m. Friday at the Valley Performing Arts Center at California State University-Northridge in Los Angeles. Other appearances are scheduled for Sunday at Reynolds Hall in Las Vegas; May 17 on the Olivia cruise from Montreal to Boston; June 6 and 7 at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle; June 8 at the at Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox Theater in Spokane, Wash.; and June 12 at the Nourse Theater in San Francisco. For more information, go to LilyTomlin.com.