In Salt Lake Acting Company’s production of “Charm,” real-life 19th century feminist and writer Margaret Fuller is reinterpreted and reborn from the brains of three women: local playwright Kathleen Cahill, director Meg Gibson and actress Cheryl Gaysunas.

I totally relate to their vision of Fuller as a woman yearning for a mate. It must have been lonely to be the most well-read person in New England, especially if you were also thought of as a freak because you were female.

And the world of Fuller and her transcendentalist contemporaries is brought to life with great…well, charm. Each scene unfolds like a painting. There’s the starry night scene, when Fuller and Henry David Thoreau (Robert Scott Smith) are bathed in dark blue light with pinpricks of white, and they’re telling the audience what the 19th century was like. After detailing the discomforts of a more primitive age, they launch into an ever-more-exultant description of their idealism. “We’re…transcendentalists!” Thoreau concludes. “Yes!” Fuller replies, in rapturous tones. “That’s why we’re talking like this!”

Then there’s the standout performance of the production, which came from the incomparable Max Robinson. He played Orestes Brownson, who served with Fuller on the editorial board of the transcendentalist magazine The Dial, and delighted in condescending to her. “This is how I have to think of him,” she said, upon which Robinson immediately obliged by delivering a spot-on impression of a braying donkey, complete with going down on all fours, that somehow still bore a striking resemblance to the misogynistic sputterings that had just been coming from his mouth.

And there’s the scene between Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nicholas Wuehrmann) and his wife, Lydian (Jayne Luke), in which they’re in a wooden bed and she keeps hitting him in the head with a pair of giant knitting needles before he has a dream about Fuller and then gets out of bed holding a giant key as if it were an erection as he goes to lock the door as if that will shut her free-spiritedness from his mind.

Oh, and I can’t forget the scene where Fuller’s dress is unfolded to cover the entire stage, literally imprisoning her in the trappings of her femininity and forming a physical barrier to separate her from Thoreau, with whom she’s trying to connect at the time.

And then there’s the scene where someone puts a frame around Jayne Luke and she becomes “Whistler’s Mother.”

It’s all quite beautiful: Set designer Keven Myhre, lighting designer Jim Craig, and costume designer Brenda Van Der Wiel joined forces to produce images that are worthy of being associated with the word “transcendent.” 

I couldn’t ask for a better cast; each is a powerhouse. I could tell that Jay Perry was doing his job well because of how much I wanted to punch him. First, as George Parker, he set the standard for Fuller’s treatment by men when he told her, in an imperious tone, “You seem less freakish now that you are weeping.” And later, as Sam Ward, he showed appreciation for her sensuality and openness when they were in private, but made it clear that he didn’t want to be associated with her in public. Each character he played was distinct, but having them played by the same actor underscored the idea that both were love interests who behaved disappointingly.

The opposite principle was displayed by having Brik Berkes play both the ultra-repressed Nathaniel Hawthorne and the rawly sensual Count Ossoli; it made their contrast even sharper.

Carianne H. Jones is always good as an ingénue, and she got the chance to show this off as three different characters, but none so sweetly ravishing as the lovely Anna Barker, who made a very plausible romantic friend for Fuller. She and Perry also got the chance to show off their stunning vocal talents in the final number.

Speaking of which, Gaysunus struck all the right notes in her remarkably energetic performance, delivering her lines with a bug-eyed intensity that was both intimidating and engaging enough to believably cause a tempest of conflict in the men around her.

I liked the idea of showing Fuller surrounded by men who felt desire for her but didn’t know how to channel it. And I found myself cheering for her when she finally found a way to form that union for which she’d been searching. 

And yet…There’s just one thing: I didn’t feel like I saw enough signs of the intellectualism that defined Margaret Fuller. She says that her father taught her Latin and that she considered it a form of birth control, as if her intelligence and education were more her curse than her calling. But she spent so much of her adult life reading, editing and writing that it was clearly important to her.

I would have gotten more of a sense of this if she’d appeared onstage more often with a book in her hand, or engaged in one of her famous conversations with a group of women whose minds she worked to improve. I wanted to fully appreciate her love for the life of the mind as well as her desire to walk away from her life for love.

Of course, that doesn't keep "Charm" from being a sheer delight. It runs through May 9; details at www.saltlakeactingcompany.org.