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Plays about early feminists often risk devolving into a long defensive argument, so full of the playwright’s insistence that this woman’s thoughts are better than the men who ignored her that any poetry gets left behind.
Kathleen Cahill’s "Charm," on the other hand, is about nothing less than the joy, heartbreak, and journey of being alive. The play, which is receiving its world premiere at Salt Lake Acting Company now through May 9 (tickets are going fast), lets us go straight into the awkward, passionate, and hilarious heart of Margaret Fuller, a 19th century journalist, feminist, and thinker who knew such literary lights as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Here, though, they’re all just people, desperate to make a genuine connection with someone else and be seen for who they really are. Desperate, like Margaret, to find someone who will see their heart as something beautiful instead of just something odd.
Of course, the English Lit majors don’t get left behind. The play has several sequences that serve as marvelous, belly laugh-inducing in-jokes for those who recognize the names, and though it would be criminal of me to spoil them for you I’ll probably spend the rest of my life giggling every time I read something where Thoreau mentions a squirrel. Brik Berkes Nathanial Hawthorne also managed to pull off the funniest and most genuine writer’s block running gag I’ve ever seen.
It’s the play’s sheer humanity, however, that will end up staying with you. Cheryl Gaysunas makes both Fuller’s spirit and loneliness equally palpable, and I wanted to weep and cheer for her as if we had somehow become best friends during the course of the play. The first moments of her tentative friendship with the shy, odd Thoreau (played with a beautifully gentle touch by Robert Scott Smith) was both silly and profoundly moving), and even as I understood Emerson’s fear of spreading his wings with Fuller (Nicholas Wuehrmann used the author’s somberness as a shield) I wanted to shake him for hurting her. When she finally found her Count, it was like I was the one who had finally found what I was always looking for.
“I am an experiment,” Fuller says at one point during the play. “Hopefully, not a failed one.”
Don’t worry, Margaret. You succeeded beautifully.
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