The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe The signs were all there. Jokey platitudes that feel depressingly familiar? Check. Comedy that supposes the audience is experiencing the show real-time in the mid-1980s? Check. A star vehicle that was written expressly for a woman's lib-aged comedian beloved for her multi-character wizardry? Check again. One would think that a show called The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe could have seen that everything was pointing to it being a show that today feels dated and unnecessary. But insight is unfortunately not something this production excels in. Written by Jane Wagner in 1985 as a one-woman star vehicle for comedian Lily Tomlin, Search for Signs was a huge success. The show played to critical acclaim on Broadway, won Tomlin the Tony for her performance and was lauded with a New York Drama Critics' Circle Special Award as well as the New York Drama Desk for a "Unique Theatrical Experience." A hardcover version of the script spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and in 1991 the piece was adapted into a movie version starring Tomlin. This was a show that shone brightly in its day. Playing a panoply of quirky, stressed-out, self-obsessed characters grappling with existential issues and the elusive meaning of life, Tomlin tossed off jokes and aphorisms like candy, to audience delight. Fast-forward 30 years, and it's not Tomlin onstage. To be fair, the talented Denise Fennell, who takes on the one-woman challenge in this show, does a fine job with most of the material. Fennell is a performer who can take the stage solo and own it for long periods of time, and she does so with several of the 12 intertwined characters she's tasked with. Trudy, the crazy, philosophical bag lady who talks to aliens and channels other humans via her botched shock treatment, is an intriguingly hunched, twitchy, ear-scratching, gravelly-voiced portrayal by Fennell. Her turns as a hopeful but potentially suicidal aerobics gal, a shopping channel sex-toy hawker and a society lady who is "bored with being bored" are all wonderfully conjured. Less successful is Fennell's gratingly unmodulated angsty teenager and a duo of prostitutes who seem to prefer yelling over speaking. In the second act, which weirdly changes style from multi-story to one overly protracted decade-long narrative addressing women's lib, Fennell does her best to keep our interest playing a group of women coming of age in the Ms. magazine era. The issue here isn't really the performance; it's what's being performed. Under director Kenn McLaughlin's exhaustingly fast-paced staging, Search for Signs is like a runaway train chugging out sitcommy one-liners and outmoded meditations on life over and over with no break in sight. "If olive oil comes from olives and peanut oil from peanuts, where does baby oil come from?" muses one character. Writing like this may have been comically revelatory back in the Cathy cartoon/Erma Bombeck days, but today lands like a mildly amusing fridge-magnet platitude, forgotten and stuck dejectedly on the side of the icebox. If the comedy style here feels dated in a post-Seinfeld/The Office world in which meditations on life have gone from punch lines to longer-form satirical contempt, then the content of much of the comedy feels ridiculously passé. Warhol jokes, Kennedy nostalgia, nods to Opium perfume, Days of Our Lives music and the touting of phone sex as the next big entrepreneurial thing are peppered throughout the show. Not to elicit sentimental laughter, but instead as the real-time present-day hooks on which the comedy relies. No doubt these moments were part of the prescient charm audiences fell for originally. We all like to see our lives and interests displayed back to us onstage. But today, without a nostalgia blanket to warm us through this seemingly endless barrage of outmoded references, all we can manage is a cool half-hearted smile. Even with all of the production's flaws, one has to give full props to Fennell, who truly does work her butt off in this show. But working hard at something that just doesn't work anymore doesn't make it spring back to life. Perhaps the intelligent signs that needed to be read here were the ones that foretold this was a comedy better left on the shelf. Through February 15. Stages Repertory Theatre, 3201 Allen Parkway, stagestheatre.com. — JG