'Charm' celebrates an extraordinary mind

She was the first female foreign correspondent and the first woman allowed to enter Harvard Library to pursue research.

She was the first female journalist at the New York Daily Tribune and the first female editor of The Dial, not to mention the fact she had a profound effect on writers Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Yet most have never heard of Margaret Fuller.

"I kept reading about, throughout my life, something called 'The Margaret Fuller problem,' " said playwright Kathleen Cahill, "and I thought, 'Who is this Margaret Fuller?' "

So Cahill decided to write a work dedicated to one of the most extraordinary minds of the 19th century. "Charm," which won the Edgerton Foundation New American Plays Award, will receive its world premiere this week at Salt Lake Acting Company.

Cahill, who grew up in New England but now lives in Utah, said she has always been drawn to the authors Fuller inspired.

"I started researching who she was. I was very intrigued by her and so were all these writers," Cahill said. "But we've never heard of her in our time."

Fuller was an author, editor, journalist, literary critic, educator, Transcendentalist and women's rights advocate. Though not very pretty, even plain, Fuller had an inexplicable spark, a magnetism that drew people to her.

"She was a woman ahead of her time," Cahill said. "She was very highly educated by her father at a time when girls weren't very educated. She was fluent in Latin and Greek as a child. She was, at one point, called the smartest person in America — not the smartest woman, the smartest person."

"She wanted things from men. She wanted them to connect in a full way, which women still want," Cahill said. "That's probably why there is a play like this; women still want that."

Though Cahill knew she wanted to write about the luminary for some time, "I thought she was unique," she said, "but I'd get depressed writing about her. She had a very hard, difficult and painful life."

"It's not like a biography. It's not a historical drama. It's a romance, it's a fantasy," Cahill said of her play.

"But yet it's about these people that lived," she said. "It's all true. But I've got these characters and I don't treat them like icons, I treat them like human beings. Like Emerson — I'm not just making him some boring guy who says brilliant things. He's got his problems, like we all do. I made them into human beings."

"Moving to Utah and a new environment where nobody cared about this helped immensely," she added.