NOTE: This Play Guide may contain mild spoilers about the story of the show. If you like to be completely surprised by the play, you may wish to wait until after seeing it to read the Play Guide.

Blackbird

» The Story: A brief synopsis of Blackbird
» Who’s Who: Characters in the play
» Feature: The End of the Innocence

The Story

Ray and Una share a shameful past. Una decides to revisit it by going to see Ray where he is living simply after serving time in prison. Now going by the name Peter, Ray doesn’t recognize Una at first because she is in her 20s. The last time he saw her, she was 12 years old, and he was 40. The two had had a brief illicit yet consensual sexual relationship, but it was soon uncovered, and Ray went to prison. Battling with his conscience for years, Ray knows what he did was wrong, yet he can’t seem to consider himself a pedophile. He tells Una that he wasn’t turned on by young girls, just one young girl—her. Immediately after they were caught, Una was told by everyone around her, lawyers, psychologists and her parents, that Ray took advantage of her and lied when he said that he cared for her. Una truly believed that she loved him and that he loved her in return. Now she’s come to see if their feelings for each other were real, and does that make them right—or even more wrong?

Who’s Who?

Una: a 20-something adult woman who has led a difficult life possibly stemming from a traumatic experience she had when she was 12 years old

Ray: a 50-something adult man who is living simply after his release from prison where he served time for committing a crime he’s unsure he should claim all the guilt for

The End of the Innocence

by Laura Schlereth

“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.” — Ernest Hemingway

The Shock of It All

Loss of innocence is probably the most popular theme in literature: a maturity achieved through new experience, disillusionment, discovery and most notoriously, through corruption. Probably the most abhorrent loss of innocence is the sexualizing of a child. Today, the name Lolita is synonymous with promiscuity in young girls. Only something that greatly impacts our culture achieves so powerful a connotation in pop culture. That impact came 50 years ago from Russian author Vladimir Nabokov in the novel Lolita, a story about a middle-aged man’s obsession with a pre-teen girl. One of the most controversial books of all time, Nabokov tells the story through the memoirs of Humbert Humbert, a man carrying a broken heart for his childhood sweetheart Annabel Leigh, who died of typhus.

A former English teacher, Humbert moves to a New England town post World War II with hopes of writing. He rents a room from widow Charlotte Haze, who falls in love with him though Humbert despises her. Instead, he develops an intense infatuation with her 12-year-old daughter Dolores “Lolita.” He has always had an affection for what he adoringly calls “nymphets,” sexually aware pubescent girls. Lolita is special to him, though, because she reminds him of Annabel. He marries Charlotte to be close to Lolita, and he fanatically follows her every move. While Lolita is away at summer camp, Charlotte stumbles upon Humbert’s journal and discovers his pedophiliac fixation on her daughter. Extremely distraught, Charlotte confronts Humbert and then runs out of the house where she is struck by a car and killed. Humbert seizes the opportunity and picks Lolita up from summer camp to take her to a motel. Humbert discovers that Lolita is more experienced than he thought; she flirts with him and confides that she had a sexual encounter with a boy at camp. He claims that it is she who seduces him. The two then embark on a yearlong travel around the country, where he becomes increasingly obsessed with her, and she learns to manipulate him. As Lolita reaches her teen years, she wishes for a relationship with someone her own age and Humbert becomes more restrictive with her. Finally, she runs away and marries another man who leaves her when she gets pregnant. Even through her troubles, she refuses to return to Humbert. Enraged, he kills her husband and is sent to prison, where he dies of a broken heart. 

Journey Through the Publishing World

After being rejected from several American publishers, Lolita was first published in 1955 in Paris by Olympia Press, known for such sex novels as White Thighs and The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe. Lolita‘s first printing of 5,000 copies sold out, but the only notable review came from author Graham Greene who, in a London Times interview, called it one of the best books of the year. The comment enraged John Gordon, editor of the Sunday Express who called Lolita the filthiest book I have ever read” and “sheer unrestrained pornography.” The book was then banned in France for two years.

The Reaction

Lolita went on to become a huge success in the U.S. when it was finally published by Putnam in 1958. It was the first book since Gone With the Wind to sell 10,000 copies in the first three weeks.

The commercial success was in spite of, or very possibly because of, the mixed reviews. The material was racy and featured a malevolent protagonist who acted solely to satisfy his selfish desire, which results in the corruption of a child. The Providence Journal commented on the appalling outrageousness of an adult’s sexual longing for a child that evolves into an actual, if erratic, relationship: “After wading along with a kind of fascinated horror through 140,000 words, most readers will probably become bored . . . at times downright sickened . . .” Yet, despite the pedophiliac theme, some critics could not deny Nabokov’s genius lyrical writing and storytelling through satire. The New Republic critic Conrad Brenner gave Lolita an excellent review calling it some of the country’s “best fiction” and Nabokov “an artist of the first rank” but in a later editorial, New Republic admitted to disagreeing with its reviewer and called Lolita an “obscene chronicle of murder and a child’s destruction,” Some felt the eloquence of the novel was downright snide considering the depravity of the subject matter. It drew outrage from the New York World Telegram‘s Leslie Hanscom who said, “There were moments . . .when my whole instinct was to land a Babbitt’s righteous punch on the super-civilized nose of the author. The novel has a tone which says that, if you cannot swallow its exquisitely distilled sewage with a good appetite, then you’d better go back where you belong and read Elbert Hubbard’s Scrapbook.”

Some publications, such as the Chicago Tribune’s Magazine of Books, just plain refused to review Lolita on the grounds of it being “pornography.” However, TIME magazine said about the shockingly sexual material: “As far as erotic detail is concerned, the book tells little that has not been dealt with in a lot of bestselling fiction; but where the sexy bestsellers talk about the sordid or tragic facts of life in staccato sociology, couch jargon or four-letter words, Lolita is the more shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny.” TIME praised Nabokov’s talent of dealing “with life as if it were a thing created by a mad poet on a spring night.”

Many others didn’t feel that Nabokov was celebrating pedophilia because although Humbert’s thoughts and actions were wicked, he was tormented by them and punished for them in the end, and Nabokov’s prolific talent in telling the corrupt story could not be ignored. The New Yorker said, “The special class of satire to which Lolita belongs is small but select, and Mr. Nabokov has produced one of the finest examples.” Thomas Molnar said in the liberal Catholic weekly Commonweal: “It has been said that this book has a high literary value; it has much more, a style, an individuality, a brilliance which may yet create a tradition in American letters.” Gene Baro from The New York Herald Tribune called the book an “artistic force” and Dorothy Park of Esquire said: ”Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—all right, then—a great book.”

On the Big Screen

The famous story was first taken on by director Stanley Kubrick to be made into a 1962 film version starring James Mason and Sue Lyon. Just like the novel, Kubrick’s film, which Nabokov helped write the screenplay for, was met with a great deal of opposition. The Production Code (Hollywood’s censorship guidelines) and the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency made great demands of editing the racy material. Lolita’s age was changed from 12 to 14 years old, and much of the poignancy of the novel was lost in censorship efforts, according to TIME‘s review.

“In the book, it was Humbert who appeared romantically naive when Lolita quite casually and ironically seduced him,” it said describing the pivotal scene. “As Nabokov created her, Lolita was as completely a symbol of innate depravity as Melville’s Billy Budd was a symbol of innate innocence. But in the movie, she seems to fall into Humbert’s voracious clutches to avoid going to an orphanage after her mother is killed by a car. This destroys the underlying theme of the novel, which was a deliberate reversal of the classic Jamesian theme of American innocence v. European corruption.”

Although the movie was nominated for multiple prestigious awards, including an Oscar nod for Nabokov’s screenplay, Kubrick admitted in a 1972 Newsweek interview that if he had known how much he would have to cater to censorship requirements, he “probably wouldn’t have made the film.”

Adrian Lyne, director of such provocative films including Fatal Attraction and 9-1/2 Weeks, had his own share of challenges when he tried his version of Lolita in 1997 starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain. With the Child Pornography Prevention Act and murder of JonBenet Ramsey in 1996, the mid-’90s had strict views on the idea of children being involved with sex, regardless of the artistic framework it was set in. After New Line Cinema dropped the film after seeing the first cut, Lyne had a difficult time finding a distributor for the infamously scandalous story until it finally got its big premiere on Showtime. Although Swain’s and Irons’ performances were received well, the film failed to make much of a mainstream impact. As one studio executive told Variety, “Pedophilia’s a hard sell.”