The hoary old playwright of the South African Experience™,
Athol Fugard has written dozens of learn-and-grow plays—few
characters, often in a house, sometimes in a single, long scene,
talking through matters personal and political—and has mastered
the form. Fugard scripts are actors’ scripts, conversations that unfold
like sonatas, wandering across a continent’s worth of emotional
terrain, picking up embellishments and emotional weight before
returning home.
Written in 1984 and based on a true story, The Road to Mecca concerns an eccentric rural widow named Miss Helen (Dee Maaske) who has
turned her house into a temple of light, covering the walls with shiny
tiles and ground glass and mirrors, filling it with candles and cement
sculptures of owls, camels, and the magi. An unctuous and conservative
local minister (Terry Edward Moore) is pushing Helen to leave her
eccentric project—later, losing his cool, he condemns it as
“idolatry”—and move into the church-owned Sunshine House for the
Aged. Miss Helen’s impetuous young friend Elsa (Marya Sea Kaminski), on
one of her rare visits from Cape Town, insists she stay and hold her
freaky fort. The minister and the idealist battle for Miss Helen’s soul
while she, worried about her recent descent into feebleness and
depression, wrings her hands and frets.
Fugard, as always, is writing about the predicament of South Africa,
but the actors, directed by Leigh Silverman, never abdicate the
humanity of their characters for political symbolism. Maaske walks the
tension between Helen’s independence, once quietly fierce but now
eroding with the nervousness and infirmity of age. She scratches at her
short, white hair and worries in a voice that retains a core of
strength beneath its old-lady warble. Helen wants to stay, for her sake
and for Elsa’s—Elsa is brash and rude and neglectful, but clings
to the idea of Helen and her sweet constancy as a psychological life
ring against drowning in bitterness of fading youth, with its bad
romances and social despair. Moore’s character is just a plot device, a
serpent masking his provincial disgust with it’s-for-your-own-good
condescension—watching these two women wrestle with their doubts
is the tough heart of The Road to Mecca. 
