Kathleen Cahill wants us to see her play as a painting.

The style of "Charm," about the transcendentalist writers of 1840s New England, is based on the style of Henri Rousseau, the playwright tells me. That explains why the posters for the show look very much like "The Dream," Rousseau's 1910 painting of a woman in a colorful jungle.

It's a fitting metaphor for the subject matter of the play: 19th century women's rights activist Margaret Fuller, and the charms she held for colorful men of the American transcendental literary movement, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Cheryl Gaysunas, who plays the role of Margaret Fuller, recalls that Cahill brought the painting theme into a workshop early in the rehearsal process. "She held up an image of stars in the universe," Gaysunas recalls. "And then she held up a more realistic picture of planets. And then she held up Van Gogh's 'The Starry Night,' which is about thick paint and glorious swirls, and it's bright and heightened and emphatic, but it's not specific. And she said, 'We're creating this kind of world. A world we're going to draw for people.' " Cahill explains, "It's not a literary, historical play; it's a work of imagination. When you see a painting, you don't say, 'What are the references?' You just accept the image that the painting gives you. And this play works in the same way. It has images that it gives you, and you accept them in the context of the play."

"The more you read about [Fuller], the more you realize that she was a revolutionary, and that she probably was the smartest person in America at that time," Gaysunas says. "She was truly brilliant, but she didn't have the educational opportunities that we take for granted. She had to fight for everything. You do realize in the course of the play just how smart she is, but more [important] to me is her longing to connect with other people and that longing to be fully understood by someone. I can't really relate to how brilliant she was, but I can relate to the longing."

Director Meg Gibson calls the piece "a surreal comedy of manners," explaining, "I'm presenting the play in a 19th century theater, but it's not literally a 19th century theater. It's an abstraction." She adds that Fuller "hijacks" the theater for her story, and that the surrealism heightened by direct address, such as when Fuller steps into the present day to address the audience, saying, "I can't find anyone else in my life to talk to, so I'm going to talk to the future."

Cahill says that she first heard of Margaret Fuller was she was reading about Emerson, and kept finding references to "The Margaret Fuller Problem," which was never fully explained. "I came to realize that just knowing her was so challenging and difficult that it got to be referred to as a problem," she says. "It challenged who they were. There's a way that people behaved and related in New England in the 1840s, and she just kept pushing the boundaries of that and wanting people to give of themselves more. She wanted more from everybody that she met. She wanted them to connect and not be reserved or withheld or full of decorum with no real emotional connection. She just kept wanting it; to really feel things and say what you're feeling."

"My character tries to connect, fully -- all-out -- with everybody on stage," Gaysunas says. "It's exuberating and it's exhausting to really throw that out at each person, to see, 'Are you the person that gets me?' "

Those other characters include Emerson (Nicholas Wuehrmann), Thoreau (Robert Scott Smith) and Hawthorne (Brik Berkes), and the accomplished cast also includes Max Robinson, Jayne Luke, Jay Perry and Carianne H. Jones.

"I knew I had a very strong Margaret when I was able to cast Cheryl," Gibson says, "and I just said, over and over to the producers, 'I have to have really great strong men around her.' " After Robinson and Smith were cast, she says, she then needed to ensure that the rest of cast was also of high caliber.

"Charm," which had a workshop production at Orlando Shakespeare Theater in November, garnered SLAC a $27,000 grant from the Edgerton Foundation New American Plays Awards this month's world premiere. The grant has allowed for six weeks of rehearsal time instead of the usual four. Gibson says it's clear that SLAC is very proud to be presenting the world premiere.

"Charm" is an important play, says Gibson, "because it's American, and it's about the beginning of our literary history."

"The play operates on so many different levels," she says. "I hope you find it wonderfully funny, and the scenes are gorgeous, but I think Kathleen is asking hugely profound questions about how it is that we exist with each other and what it is about each one of us that's eternal, no matter what your belief system is."