Lo and Hum as Ho and Hum

By T.E. Kalem. Reported by Peter Ainslie/New York

LOLITA by Edward Albee

The placards read INCEST ISN'T SEXY and RAPE ISN'T FUNNY. The picketers shouted, "Lolita is a lie, pass it by!" and "Three-five-seven-nine, don't make profits from this crime!"

They need not have wasted their cardboard or their chants. The Broadway adaptation of Lolita forestalled them. After bombing in Boston, it limped into New York to be greeted by financial difficulties, internecine strife and 60 or so members of a feminist group called Women Against Pornography.

"What we are protesting," said WAP Coordinator Barbara Mehrhof, "is not just Lolita but the whole concept of the 'Lolita syndrome': the sexualizing of little girls. It's the whole Brooke Shields phenomenon."

After a change of director and two postponed openings, other edgy words surfaced--this time between first-time Producer Jerry Sherlock, an ex-fabric broker from Seventh Avenue, Playwright Edward Albee and Star Donald Sutherland, who was making his first stage appearance in 17 years. Sherlock almost ran short on his $700,000 budget, and the day before the opening Sutherland found that his paycheck had bounced, an error that has since been rectified. Says Albee: "One thing about Sherlock, he may not know anything about producing for the theater, but he certainly knows how to cut corners."

Albee's plaint about Sutherland: "He hasn't been onstage in 17 years, so he's scared out of his mind. There were some scenes that he thought were possibly a bit too difficult for him, so I had to simplify a couple of scenes a little bit." Responds Sutherland: "Absolute bull. Every once in a while Edward would write something that was not terribly good, and one would say, 'Edward, I don't think I can do that.' Nothing had been rejected on the basis of my being incapable of doing it."

Indeed, nothing seems to have been rejected at all, except for taste and value. Throughout, Lolita proves to be less a tribute to Vladimir Nabokov than a travesty. To get to the hot question first, the play is no pornographic scorcher. True, there are guarded scenes of fellatio and cunnilingus, but in this era of X-rated films and worse, they are surprisingly restrained.

Almost everyone has heard of Lolita 's hero, Humbert Humbert (Donald Sutherland), a richly cultured European emigre who lusts perversely and voraciously for prepubescent girls whom he calls nymphets. In the nymphet he finds an "elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm" and something of a "demon." In a small New England town he spots his divine demon, Dolores Haze, a girl of 11 1/2, played in this production by 24-year-old Blanche Baker.

To be near her and to reap her virginity at an apt moment, Humbert marries her mother Charlotte (Shirley Stoler); By chance, she hurtles down a flight of stairs to her death and Humbert is free to pursue his lascivious designs. To his shock and chagrin, Lolita seduces him.

Lo and Hum embark on an odyssey across the U.S., but the restive Lolita soon arranges with Clare Quilty (Clive Revill) to escape. Quilty is a rich screenwriter and a malignant toad of a man who appears late in the novel. In the play, he does four or five turns in transparent disguises for slightly menacing comic relief, but Revill's strident hamminess inhibits laughter. Toward play's end, after a wrenching reunion visit with Lolita, now a postnymphet, 17, pregnant and happily married to a simple ex-G.I, Humbert goes forth and kills Quilty with erratic, sporadic shots from a mini-handgun in a droll murder sequence.

Since the novel used a first-person monologue in the form of diary entries, Albee took a technical gamble--and lost. He introduces a character called A Certain Gentleman (Ian Richardson) to share the burden of narration. Because the gentleman is supposedly Nabokov, Humbert Humbert's moral turpitude is diminished: he cannot, after all, defy the will of his creator. Still, it is good to have Richardson in the role, with his ironic disdain and impeccable diction. Sutherland is admirably suited to Humbert's chortling lusts and absurdity, but a trifle negligent of the character's pain. Baker, chosen after a long talent hunt for prepubescent sexpots, is disappointing as Lolita. She begins as a little girl with a lollipop and swiftly becomes a brat with a staff sergeant's mouth and no trace of dreamy allure. Alaina Wojek, as Humbert's long-lost childhood sweetheart, Annabel, seems the more likely nymphet.

Albee has taken many liberties with Nabokov without a poet's license. The author, for example, thought Freud "a Viennese quack." The playwright rings in Freudian overtones. The novel took place in the phantasmagoria of American motels. The play is confined to a stark, cumbersome set. The overriding discrepancy is not one of appearance but of style and sensibility. Nabokov's tone is sensuous, elegant and exhilarating, with champagne-carbonated wit. Albee's tone is smarmy and pompous, with humor mulled at a Dean Martin roast. George S. Kaufman was wrong. It is not always satire that closes on Saturday night; it may be pedophilia. --By T.E. Kalem. Reported by Peter Ainslie/New York

With reporting by Peter Ainslie/New York

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