Theater: Lo and Hum as Ho and Hum

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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 11½, 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.