Word: lolitas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...LOLITA by Edward Albee...
...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...
...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...