About the author: http://www.kathleencahill.org/
DMN Reviewo f the play:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-charm_1115gd.State.Edition1.3f77188.html
Stage review: 'Charm' offers modern, and charming, take on 19th-century heroine
Charm has, well, charm.
Kathleen Cahill's play is about Margaret Fuller, an early 19th-century American journalist and philosopher whom few in her own era would have called charming. Educated far beyond what society deemed acceptable for women, Fuller struck people as bold and even freakish.
....More on the website....
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Background info on production
‘Charm’ takes on the question: ‘What do women want?’
Here's a story that's running in Sunday's Sentinel:
By Elizabeth Maupin
Sentinel Theater Critic
Henry David Thoreau is obsessed with bugs. Nathaniel Hawthorne has a serious case of writer’s block. And Margaret Fuller — the journalist, critic and advocate for women’s rights — is trying to imagine a life for herself in a world where all the intellects of the day are men.
That’s the world of Charm, Kathleen Cahill’s comedy of manners about the great American thinkers of the 1840s, which Orlando Shakespeare Theater will present in a workshop production Nov. 19-22. Charm had a public reading last winter at Orlando Shakespeare’s Harriett Lake Festival of New Plays, or PlayFest, and its popularity there led the theater to take it farther down the line.Photos: Top right: Melissa Mason and Katherine Michelle Tanner in Charm. Below left: Meg Gibson. Photos courtesy of Orlando Shakespeare Theater.
In Cahill’s quirky view, Fuller is the woman who inspired The Scarlet Letter — “a sexually vibrant woman in a puritan age. It is also a comedy, and it is also like a painting by Rousseau in which the magical and extraordinary coexist with the ordinary. It’s a fantasia on American history with a woman at the center.”
Director Meg Gibson says she has long been a “huge fan” of Thoreau, Hawthorne and their circle, but she was “completely unaware” of their friend Margaret Fuller.
“She’s not part of our common education,” says Gibson, a New York-based director and actor. “Not only was she this amazingly bright woman, but she was up against the most impossible situation. [Charm] is about what do men want, and what do women want, and what do we want when we want each other.”
Charm — which had its genesis in the fact that playwright Cahill grew up swimming in Walden Pond — has had a couple of previous workshops, in New York and in Washington state, and it will have a first full production in Salt Lake City in the spring. As Cahill pointed out earlier this year, the script may be difficult to produce because it has “some special requirements — like a dress that grows, and leaves that fall and become sheets of paper, and a woman’s feet that sparkle.”
In fact, Charm is a play about real people that’s not at all realistic. That’s fitting, Gibson says, for a script about 19th-century writers who were ahead of their time.
“If you’ve read The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne was very cinematic,” Gibson says. “Cahill is too.”
Gibson, who is also a playwright, got involved in Orlando Shakespeare’s workshop production because she will direct the full production in Salt Lake City.
“I jumped at it,” she says. “It’s a play that requires some extensive improvisation by the actors. And I think the Transcendentalists were the first great intellects of our country.”
Appearing in Charm in Orlando will be Katherine Michelle Tanner (Laura in Orlando Shakespeare’s Glass Menagerie) as Margaret Fuller, Brandon Roberts as Thoreau, T. Robert Pigott as Hawthorne and Nicholas Wuehrmann as Emerson, along with Michael Gill, Kevin E. Kelly, Allison DeCaro and Melissa Mason.
In a workshop, actors move about the stage but have their scripts in hand, and playwrights may add or subtract from their scripts from one performance to the next.
“What’s great for an audience is they get to do a lot of the imagining,” Gibson says of the workshop process, which usually involves minimal props and rudimentary costumes and sets. “They get to focus on the actors and the play.
“It’s a marvelous float between the page and a full production,” she goes on. “Readings tell you some things. But only when a play is up on its feet can you see what kind of legs a play is going to have. I think Charm is going to have some gorgeous legs.”
‘Charm’
What: Orlando Shakespeare Theater workshop production of Kathleen Cahill comedy.
Where: Lowndes Shakespeare Center, 812 E. Rollins St., Orlando.
When: 7 p.m. Thursday Nov. 19, 8 p.m. Friday Nov. 20 and Saturday Nov 21, 2 p.m. Sunday Nov. 22.
Cost: $10.
Call: 407-447-1700 Ext. 1.
Online: Orlandoshakes.org.
What else: A talkback with the playwright, director and actors will follow each performance.
Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426.
Kitchen Dog Theatre show FRIDAY!
Directed by: Christopher Carlos
Featuring: Cindy Beall, Michael Federico, John M. Flores, Martha Harms, Christopher Hury, Tina Parker, Jeffrey Schmidt And Brian Witkowicz
"Funny yet beautiful, Charm is a visionary show that breathes life into literary icons." – The Daily Utah Chronicle
The Play: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau get knocked off their respective pedestals by free spirit Margaret Fuller. Magical, surreal, and transcendentally goofy, Charm has been captivating audiences around the country with its humorous look at societal expectations and the ridiculous rules of love.
The Playwright: Kathleen Cahill's work in theater and musical theater has been seen across the country at the Kennedy Center, Porchlight Theater in Chicago, Signature Theater in Arlington, TheaterWorks in Palo Alto, Barrington Stage Company, and Salt Lake Acting Company, among others.
Attendance to show- 50 points
Critique of show- 50 points
http://www.kitchendogtheater.org/
Directions: From Downtown
Take Akard St. or Olive
towards Woodall Rodgers
Turn right at the first
light on McKinney Ave. (North)
Just past the light atOak Grove,
the road will curve to the right
Turn righ immediately
following "La Tour" high rise
From N. Central Expressway:
Take 75 South
Exit 1B Haskell/Blackburn, Lemmon & Hall St.
Turn right at Hall St.(third light)
Turn left at the first light onto Oak Grove
The MAC is one block down on the right, (a blue brick
building, first right after Bowen
The Show starts at 8 p.m., arrive NO LATER than 7:30 p.m. (otherwise you will not get in)
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