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At the end of Chekhov's The Three Sisters Olga says, "In time we shall pass on for ever and be forgotten. Our faces will be forgotten and our voices and how many of us there were."1 This has not happened. So powerful are the shades of Olga, Masha, and Irina that, whatever their later names may be, theater audiences will always remember that there were three of them. In Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart (1979) their names are Lenny, Meg, and Babe; in Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig (1992) they are Sara, Gorgeous, and Pfeni; while in Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Break of Day (1995), April, Tess, and Nina are erstwhile sisters in feminism and longtime friends. In Yorkshire playwright Blake Morrison's We Are Three Sisters (2011), more curiously, they are Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë.2 Henley's, Wasserstein's, and Wertenbaker's plays transpose Chekhov's characters and some of the motifs and themes associated with them to new times and places while ignoring the original dramatic situation and most of the Chekhovian dialogue. Morrison's play, by contrast, despite depicting historical individuals who are well known in their own right, parallels Chekhov's in considerable detail. Except for one brief additional act, Morrison uses the structure, character types, and themes of Chekhov's play as well as numerous echoes of its dialogue and stage action to write a biographical drama about the Brontës.
The bulk of this essay will draw on contemporary theories of adaptation to explain why three important women dramatists have chosen to rewrite The Three Sisters and what we might learn about their plays-as well as Chekhov's-from a comparative study of the ways in which they respond to and exploit Chekhovian characters and themes. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier argue that adaptation is not only a creative act but also "features a specific and explicit form of criticism."3 Crimes of the Heart, The Sisters Rosensweig, and The Break of Day variously illuminate some of the ways in which adaptation operates creatively in producing new works and critically in offering new insights into the adapted work. Morrison's We Are Three Sisters is a different case. As a double adaptation-of the historical lives of the Brontës and of Chekhov's play-We Are Three Sisters provides an intriguing opportunity to enter...