ABSTRACT
In her latest book, A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon points out that when discussing any adaptation, one should foremost ask oneself “what, who, why, how, when, and where” (xiv). As in his previous plays, in The Fourth Sister, Glowacki uses Chekhov’s classic text as a springboard from which he weaves a modern story, with a characteristic sense of ironic inversion. Glowacki’s Antigone in New York (1993) was a retelling of Sophocles’s tragedy with a twist: the characters are not nobles caught up in the fickle- ness of fate and their own hubris, but homeless bums, desperately clinging to the remains of their senses of dignity. Fortinbras Gets Drunk (1990) was a retelling of the story of Hamlet from the point of view of Norwegians, a comic and macabre treatise on the ends of politics and its moral dimension. Even Hunting Cockroaches (1987) was a nod to Hunting Flies, the
