Word: humberts
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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 11½, played in this production by 24-year-old Blanche Baker...
...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...
...Baker's Lolita, Albee's penchant for moralizing asserts itself, as though, to make up for his exploitation of this theme, he decides the audience must be scolded for its interest. He chooses a moral that seems both believable, and indeed, close to Nabokov's own intentions in Lolita: Humbert's love for Lolita is the futile dream of a man doomed to try to recapture his own lost past. But Albee's Nabokov character must trudge to center-stage and tell us all this, flat out. If Albee was not playwright enough to embody this message in his dramatic...
...best qualities of this Lolita gather in its closing scene, to end the evening of literary vampirism on an up-beat note. Albee faithfully recreates Nabokov's part-farcical, part-horrifying murder scene: as the last act of his love-obsession, Humbert tracks down and decides to kill the man who had eventually helped Lolita escape him--the effeminate playwright Clare Quilty, played by William Mooney (standing in for Clive Revill in the performance I saw). Mooney enters from the top of a long, garishly majestic stairway leading down into a scene of post-party streamers, ashtrays and drinks. Sutherland...
...this Lolita suggests very simply that Nabokov's is not a novel for the stage. In print the author can swathe the transgression he is describing in bundles of carefully selected sentences that, by explaining, defending, or indicting Humbert's obsession, make us ponder its meaning. On stage, nothing tempers the nakedness of the act; and when Albee's Lolita takes off her bathrobe to say, "Come and get it, Daddy," or buries her face in Humbert's groin, Richardson must literally draw a curtain over the scene--a comic gesture that only underscores Albee's inability to find...