Lolita

THE STORY: Widely familiar as a successful novel and motion picture, LOLITA details the controversial obsession of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man of some education and refinement, to possess Dolores Haze, a pre-teen “nymphet.” Comprised of a series of interrelated scenes which are commented on by an urbane narrator, the play follows the peregrinations of the increasingly desperate Humbert as he first marries Dolores’s 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—her tormentors, in turn, follow their own destinies toward either madness or murder.