Evaluating Edward Albee's Lolita solely on the basis of injustices done to the Nabokov novel is a disservice to the play; such evaluation misses Albee's larger, more theatrical intent. The drama at best uses the novel as a departure point, adopts its narrative framework, exploits certain of its verbal and visual images. Albee unsuccessfully attempts something more ambitious than mere adaptation; his departures from the novel are calculated to facilitate his own theatrical and spiritual sensibility. Comparing the play and the novel makes such a sensibility manifestly clear. The Nabokov book should be examined to illuminate Albee's work; it should not be used as a sacrosanct standard by which to judge the quality of an adaptation.

Even enthusiastic admirers of the novel may forget the brief introduction that precedes the journal of Humbert Humbert. The manuscript has passed from Humbert to his legal counsel and subsequently to an editor after Humbert's death. Even now, certain precautions have been taken to insure that involved parties will not be identified…. This preface pretends to lift Lolita beyond the realm of fiction…. (p. 77)

Albee's Lolita opens with the appearance of "A Certain Gentlemen"—the theatrical descendant of the editor. He too introduces the pedophilic mania of Humbert and establishes a framework for Humbert's appearance, but here his resemblance to Nabokov's editor ceases. For A Certain Gentleman is a writer, an artist who claims responsibility for the creation that appears before us; he does not merely offer the work of another man. Nor does he withdraw and leave us alone with Humbert. On the contrary, he takes an active role: he remains visible throughout the evening, conspires with the other characters in Humbert's absence, and jokes with the audience during Humbert's love scenes. His presence, instead of suggesting that the story has happened (or could happen), reminds us that this version is totally fictitious, the product of his imagination; this Humbert, fantastic and remote, cannot demand confrontation and is safe, laughable, distant.

The play follows the novel's basic narrative path. (pp. 77-8)

The picaresque structure of the Nabokov novel carries us more and more deeply into the unique psychological world of Humbert, while using Humbert's passions to stand for larger, more universal human passions and obsessions. Puritanism tempers the pedophilic, moral rigor matches prurience, a black grimness of humor and purpose balances a surprising frailty. Such combinations account for much of the novel's power…. These alliances of light and dark, of universal and idiosyncratic are the crucial determinants of Humbert's character, yet these alliances are severed in Albee's adaptation.

Albee's Author embodies the moral force, the restrainer who must confound Humbert. When sensual encounters border on the graphic, the Author drops a large curtain and obscures the lovemaking, he encourages Clare Quilty's attempts to lure Lolita from Humbert; he even calls a halt to Humbert's call for pedophiliacs in the audience and curtails the graphic description of seduction. Humbert willingly relinquishes such moral restraint but thereby loses any sensitivity, sense of love, or moral presence that could deepen and enrich the character. Albee confines Humbert's obsessive passions to the sexual, and reduces his love to mere pedophilic lust.

This bifurcation of Nabokov's Humbert maims any growing moral tension. The Author and Humbert enjoy a congenial relationship. They treat Humbert's love as amusing, inevitable, perhaps even as logical, but never as obsessive or alarming; Freudian vaudeville replaces passion. Even the normally stern Author allows himself to slide into sleaze after the seduction of Lolita…. Albee's Lolita is sterile, passionless, and his protagonist is a satyr, not a sufferer.

But perhaps Albee's Lolita is not supposed to be about passions at all. Indeed, adapting Lolita for the stage has incurred a host of new problems that alone may account for such a switch in focus. In the novel, Lolita is never seen except through Humbert's eyes. Even in her most difficult moments, his epithets of passion bathe her in a beatific glow, incarnate her as a divine "nymphet"; she never vanishes from our minds. This technique of perpetual presence and its importance to the themes of obsession are more difficult, though not impossible, to achieve onstage; indeed, Lolita's stage appearances undermine our response to Humbert's passion. Embodied by an actress, Lolita attains precisely the independence of persona that Nabokov denies her. Humbert's paeans to sensuality are contradicted by the corporeal presence of a gangly, foul-mouthed girl with jutting elbows and knocking knees. Her every move strains any belief in Humbert's "light of my life, fire of my loins," and when she exits, she vanishes—totally. A tension is automatically established between Humbert's possessed perceptions of Lolita and the audience's more objective, detached ones. The commonplace Lolita cannot match the ethereal one Humbert describes; her pretensions to any eroticism beyond mere carnality become solely inventions of Humbert's. And because he is reduced to a one dimensional, amoral omnivore, she cannot really affect him by provoking any inner conflict or confusion; she can only satisfy his sexual appetite. From god-life figura, she has descended to mere creation.

This concern with creator and creation dominates Albee's play. A superstructure has been imposed on the novel, one that emphasizes the Author as figura as the Humbert-Author relationship supercedes the Humbert-Lolita one. In the play, Albee creates a surrogate presence, A Certain Gentleman. This second Author in turn creates Humbert, who in turn creates Lolita…. Such a structure holds fascinating potential on various moral, social, psychological, even theological planes.

But Albee does not carry this structure beyond its inception; there is no consistent development of ideas…. [Nothing] that Albee accomplishes in Lolita suggests any fascination, indeed any involvement, with his characters or with this new emphasis on the created and the creator. Deprived of passions and true feelings, his characters can reveal nothing about love; stripped of moral dimension, the play can neither indict nor condone social mores; tentative in its understanding of the connection between art and artist, the play cannot manipulate the distance between audience and actor or between author and play. Lolita does not have to be about Humbert's passion for Lolita, but neither can it be a work totally devoid of passion. The dramatic Author(s), in denying any passionate involvement with their creations, undercut the ultimate source of literary life and energy. Albee's Lolita is born of inertia, tedium, and it frequently discloses its parentage. This passionless center only emphasizes Albee's own lack of vital connection with the theater and compounds the problems of adaptation.

For Lolita traps as well as inspires Albee. The idea of adaptation frees Albee for his new focus; in dealing with situations and themes already created, he can more fully manipulate certain distances and structures. But Albee never demonstrates a need for using Lolita as his source; hundreds of other novels could have served his purposes just as easily. Nabokov's plot, a reaction to social attitudes of the 1950's, cannot meet certain demands of the 1980's, especially when forced into the present and stripped of its passionate underpinnings. Albee nonetheless tries to update the novel by merely adding four letter words, stale jokes about the Shah, and lame references to early morning television. Such vulgarizations cannot move Lolita into the present. Indeed, this additional profanity clearly violates Nabokov's sense of propriety and stunning verbal economy, while highlighting Albee's verbal flabbiness. "Is this a lecture?" the Author asks. "An exegesis. The briefest of exegeses," Humbert replies. Such hair-splitting demonstrates the turgid, untheatrical nature of the text. (pp. 78-9)