It is set in the 1840’s, about people who actually existed: a remarkable woman, Margaret Fuller, and her relationships with many of the great literary figures of her time—Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne—men whose works we know well. But the past is an invention, and therefore the characters glide between worlds: they live in and out of history, in and out of the past.

The play is about writers, people who made worlds out of words. The language of the play is rich. It is also full of anachronisms. Margaret Fuller was a woman ahead of her time, and so she sometimes uses the language of our time, and dreams our dreams.

On another level, CHARM is about several famous men, and one forgotten woman. It is a play about who history remembers and who it forgets, and why.

It is a surreal comedy of manners, a play about what men and women want from each other, the difficulties of communication, and how we are inhibited or freed by the manners and conventions of our time.

It’s also about American Transcendentalism, the belief in the freedom of the human spirit to transcend the confines of history and time. I believe great writing can free the soul. The writings of the Transcendentalists continue to inspire me, and I believe we need them more than ever now, as our towers of greed crumble around us.