We honor the strides made by the early feminists, but what would it have been like to actually spend time with them? Would they have been angry? Funny? Tender? Would we be amazed at how much of their fire had been lost to history?
Kathleen Cahill’s Edgerton Award-winning “Charm,” which is getting its world premiere at Salt Lake Acting Company April 14 through May 9, gives audiences a chance to meet the amazing, impossible Margaret Fuller (tickets are available online). An early journalist, transcendentalist, and women’s rights activist, Fuller wrote what is still considered to be the first major feminist work in the United States. “Charm,” however, peers inside the woman’s heart, from her relationships with literary giants such as Nathanial Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson to an
entertainingly surreal world view.
“The play isn’t straightforward,” said Meg Gibson, the play’s director. “We’re talking about really incredibly great – I mean, for me, the initial source of great American writing is with Emerson, and Hawthorne, and Thoreau. What Kathleen has done that is so great is that it’s not some bio play. It’s looser than Tom Stoppard for crying out loud! And what she’s done is created this surreal – I call it a Surreal Comedy of Manners from the 1840s. The idea that something can be surreal and American is just like – Wow! ‘Before the 20th century?!”’
Margaret Fuller, however, says it best herself in “Charm.” “It is only dreamers who can understand reality.”
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