The Crime Lady: Highsmith and Nabokov at the Theater

Dear TCL subscribers,

I don’t often go to the theater, so attending two off-Broadway productions in 48 hours, as I did this past week, is unusual behavior. And while I can’t say that either production was stellar, they were both relevant to my interests, and a window into why adaptations are so tricky and so varied.

Switzerland, by Australian playwright and author Joanna Murray-Smith and playing at 59E59 until March 3, purports to tell the story of the last days of Patricia Highsmith. She receives a mysterious young visitor calling himself Edward Ridgway (Daniel Petzold) at her home in the Swiss Alps, where she is surrounded by the objects she loves best: guns, knives, snails, cigarettes, booze, and of course, her typewriter. He has come from America, representing a prospective publisher, or maybe an agent — it’s rather unclear — on a quest to get Highsmith (Peggy J. Scott) to sign on and write one last Ripley novel. What follows are many changes in mood and psychological epiphanies, and twists, and death, and what’s supposed to be in keeping with a Patricia Highsmith novel. Except.

As I said to my friend M, who has been in the book business for a very long time, when Switzerland was over, “we both know way too much about Patricia Highsmith.” She laughed. But I felt the pinprick of disappointment within the first two minutes, when “Ridgway” and Highsmith trade barbs about email. Would Highsmith have sent an email in 1995? It shouldn’t matter, but as an audience member I shouldn’t have had to think about this question.

Or when, mid-way through Switzerland, Highsmith walks “Ridgway” through the plot-in-progress of this unfinished Ripley idea, which I suppose would have been the sixth and final book, four or so years after Ripley Under Water (1991). That plot imagines Ripley stalking and eventually marrying a beautiful young girl in order to steal her trust fund, which is a perfectly fine plot, one that is meant to echo The Talented Mister Ripley, except that it completely forgets the four Ripley novels published after Talented, which introduces the best character in the series other than Tom Ripley: his enigmatic, complicated, mercurial wife Heloise.

Scott and Petzold did their best and more with material that continued to fail them. Scott, in the show notes, thanked Joan Schenkar, author of the definitive biography The Talented Miss Highsmith, “for her insights and generosity” and I suspect they were significant enough for Scott to create a deeper performance than Switzerland deserved. Petzold, alas, had even less to work with. The script gave him a part that re-imagines a Tom Ripley wannabe who owes more to Matt Damon’s portrayal in the 1999 film adaptation directed by Anthony Minghella rather than the books (or even Alain Delon in Purple Noon, or John Malkovich in Ripley’s Game.)

The mistake Murray-Smith made was to create a work about Highsmith using the plot devices Highsmith made wholly her own. Jill Dawson did so more successfully in her 2016 novel The Crime Writer, which imagines Highsmith in trouble, creatively and personally, in the mid-1960s. But Switzerland is too lazy and ahistorical to make it work. What if an older gentleman had been the one to arrive at the writer’s door, making it even less likely for Highsmith to recognize him as springing from her imagination? Or a woman, of any age, which would have added some nascent sexual tension that, as depicted and resolved in the play, is cheap and contrived?

Switzerland doesn’t work because it engages only with a simulacrum of Patricia Highsmith, not the real article. And certainly not much with the work she actually wrote. Tom Ripley was her most original and standout creation, yes. But there’s a reason she went back to him sporadically (a la John Updike with Rabbit) while producing other novels varying from decent to flat-out-masterpieces, like The Price of Salt or Deep Water or The Glass Cell.

I’m glad I saw Switzerland because mediocre art helps me engage better with great art. Highsmith produced great art, and her life resulted in one definitive biography (by Schenkar) and one pretty good one (by Andrew Wilson). There are great adaptations of her work, and even of her life, to be made, so long as it reflects the result of proper reading and informed interpretation.

Last year, when I wrote for Vulture about the making of Lolita, My Love, the 1971 musical adaptation by Alan Jay Lerner (book & lyrics) and John Barry (music) that tried to get to Broadway and failed, I never thought I would see the show staged. It seemed an impossible task when the premise simply couldn’t work for a Broadway audience. But a few months after the piece published, and just when my book tour was winding down, I learned that Lolita, My Love would be staged, part of Musicals In Mufti’s focus on Lerner’s later-career flops.

I bought two tickets, convinced Lyndsay Faye to be my plus-one, and together we headed out to the York Theatre Company on a Saturday afternoon for the first preview (the show runs through March 3.) The best way I can describe this most thoroughly discombobulating theatrical experience is that I was glad to bear witness. Will Lolita, My Love ever be staged again after February 3? And should it? My answers are still no, but I sure appreciate the effort in trying.

The problem, as was the case in the original Philadelphia and Boston productions, is the book. Lerner drafted it a half-dozen times, even tried again (changing the title to Light of My Life) after the out-of-town closings, but none of them worked. And though Erik Haagensen tried to Frankenstein’s Monster a cohesive libretto out of those drafts, it’s not meant to be cohesive. It reminded me, in a way, of the Hard Case Crime publication of James M. Cain’s The Cocktail Waitress, the novel he struggled to complete in the final years of his life, writing and then throwing out different drafts and ultimately leaving the whole project unfinished upon his death in 1977.

Like Cain’s final novel, Lolita, My Love does have some brilliant spots. The numbers for Claire Quilty, in particular “Going, Going Gone” are excellent. As George Abud portrayed him in the current staging, I felt a connection all the way back to 1971, when Leonard Frey delivered his own standout performance. Jessica Tyler Wright’s performance of “Sur Le Quais de Ramsdale, Vermont” was as thrilling to watch as it must have been when Dorothy Loudon brought the house down in Philadelphia and Boston.

Those showstoppers are part of the problem. They appear in Act One, sung by characters who die in the first act (though Quilty, because of the show’s structure, returns in Act Two.) Humbert Humbert (Robert Sella), as written by Lerner, is a Henry Higgins stand-in, with Dolores Haze (Caitlin Cohn) — I should point out she is never, ever referred to in the show as Dolores, and hardly ever as Dolly — a more grotesque, prepubescent Eliza Doolittle. And the numbers Lerner wrote reflect his desire to entertain with erudition, forgetting that you can do that in a book, and you can do that if you’re Vladimir Nabokov, pulling a fast one on the reader’s moral compass, but when present with the acted-out article, the comedy evaporates, and the creep factor increases.

The actors bear no fault in the slightest. Their work was generally excellent, and I felt how hard they worked and how hard they wanted to make Lolita, My Love work. When Dolores is raped for the first time, no matter how much Humbert tries to present it as seduction, the pain she feels is palpable. And this staged version ends with three women on stage: Dolores, her mother, Charlotte, and Dr. June Ray (Thursday Farrar), a genderflip I found to be thematically convincing.

But Lolita, My Love doesn’t work, it can’t work, and I don’t see much point in trying again. I still remember what Dan Siretta, who ended up as the show’s choreographer in the second version but was a principal dancer in the first staging, told me: “John Neville [who played Humbert] kept saying, ‘There’s nobody really to root for. Nobody to care about. You care about the child — the victimization of this child. But the play…’ Everybody was reading the novel. In Philly, everyone was fixing the book in their own head.”

You can’t fix the unfixable, or adapt the unadaptable. The more adaptations of Lolita people attempt, the more convinced I am that the novel cannot translate into a different medium and still retain fidelity to what Vladimir Nabokov intended.

I’m off on vacation for a couple of weeks. Stay tuned for the next paid newsletter in mid-to-late March.

Until then, I remain,

The Crime Lady