The Road To Mecca by Athol Fugard

The Road to Mecca is a play by contemporary playwright Athol Fugard, with a story based loosely on the life of artist Helen Martins. We saw the Seattle Rep's production of the show, directed by Leigh Silverman and starring Marya Sea Kaminski, Dee Maaske, and Terry Edward Moore. The play was originally produced in 1984, and was adapted into a film in 1992.

The real Helen Martins lived from 1897 - 1976 and was the creator of the Owl House, known today as a national landmark in South Africa. She woke one day to her singular vision of turning her home and yard into a sort of Mecca away from Mecca, and spent the rest of her life up until her death working on it. Especially the inside of her home made great use of the play of light, using ground glass, mirrors, and other reflective surfaces and objects to catch and reflect the light in different ways.

The action of the play takes place all on a single night, very late in Helen's life, when her good friend Elsa, a 20something schoolteacher living far away in the big city, arrives for an unexpected and brief visit to her dear friend in the dusty and desolate desert for some very important and pressing reasons, which we learn more and more about as the play progresses. As the evening moves on we discover Helen has been having troubles with the rest of her small-town community, and that her friend Marius (town pastor and no friend of Elsa's) is due for a visit later that evening where Helen will be faced to make a very important decision about her living conditions.

For a story that takes place completely in one room involving just three characters and several compressed hours of action, this play is immensely rich. It has very much what I think of as a traditional essence of theater quality about it in that it is all about the actors and the story, and would have been be almost as engaging a theatre experience were it taking place only on a bare stage with three plain chairs and a the most basic lighting effects. Fugard has pared things down to provide us with just the most essential defining moments in the lives of the three characters, which leave us knowing an entire lifetime's worth of living, philosophy, and personal growth for all three. The effect was riveting throughout, and would never have worked were it not for the wonderful acting of the expertly-tuned cast.

This isn't to say the set design and lighting had no effect. With the primary subject of Helen's life being her artistically rendered living quarters, which came alive in the cast of candlelight, the play was made immensely richer having the visual references to enhance the actor's dwelling place. We didn't need to imagine the magic that Elsa was speaking of when she described how glorious Helen's work looked, because the set and lighting showed that beautifully themselves.

You can hear an excerpt of a radio adaptation of the play by LA Theatre Works here.