Charm
by Kathleen Cahill

Full-Length Comedy / Told in the style of magical realism, Charm presents the story of an extraordinary woman: the brilliant, but forgotten, American writer and feminist, Margaret Fuller, who inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece The Scarlet Letter.

Set in an imagined America of the 1840s, the play portrays Margaret's emotional journey from a plain, bookish young woman suffering unrequited love for her handsome cousin to the confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathanial Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau and the New-York Tribune's first female war correspondent, writing dispatches from the front lines of the Italian revolution.

Margaret recounts her personal exploration of the spiritual movement, Transcendentalism, and her intimate—if frustrating— friendships with the icons of American literature, all of whom lacked the ability to express their feelings for her.

Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the play mixes comedy and tragedy in a magical world where statues talk, characters speak anachronistically and the ordinary and the surreal exist side by side.

(Cast: 5m., 3w.)