Lolita

Edward Albee.

Play. Adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov

6 men, 8 women. Unit Set

The controversial play, drawn from the equally controversial novel, is concerned with the obsession of a middle-aged man for a twelve-year-old "nymphet". The play is a picaresque blending of wild humour, affecting emotion and, in the end, inevitable degradation.

Brooks Atkinson Theatre - Mar 19, 1981

Widely familiar through its success as a novel and as a motion picture, the action of the play details the driving obsession of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man of some education and refinement, to possess Dolores Haze, a preteen "nymphet."

Comprised of a series of interrelated scenes, which are bridged and wryly commented on by an urbane narrator (A Certain
Gentleman), the play follows the peregrinations of the increasingly desperate Humbert as he marries Dolores' mother and then engineers her death—after which he and Lolita embark on a zigzag tour of America's motels, always one step ahead of another "dirty old man" with whom his hostage is in love. In the end "Lolita" escapes Humbert's clutches only to marry a deaf man and die in childbirth—while her tormentors, in turn, follow their own destinies toward madness and murder.