ABSTRACT
Only a fe w o f Kushner' s predecessor s amon g first-rank America n dramatist s have dabble d i n adaptation : O'Neil l transforme d Aeschylus' s Oresteia int o Mourning Becomes Electra, Miller adapte d Ibsen' s An Enemy of the People, Williams refashione d Chekhov' s The Sea Gull as The Notebook of Trigorin, an d Albee made Nabokov's novel Lolita into a play. Among Kushner's peers, comparatively few, save David Mame t wh o ha s adapte d Chekhov , work a s adaptors — and non e wit h th e breadt h o r boldnes s o f Kushner . Hi s impressivel y divers e adaptations includ e plays ranging fro m th e seventeenth centur y to the present , and includ e work s by Corneill e {LTllusion comique), Goethe {Stella. A Play for Lovers), Kleist {Die Heilige Cacilie), the Brother s Grim m ("Th e Tw o Journey - men"), Ansk y {The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds), and Brech t {The Good Person of Setzuan), as well as a politically charged contemporary novel , Widows, co-adapted fo r th e stag e by Kushner an d th e novel' s author , Chilean expatriat e writer Ariel Dorfman .
