Benson Explores Fugard’s ‘Road to Mecca’ at SCR

The staging of “The Road to Mecca” on the Mainstage at South Coast Repertory marks the third play by Athol Fugard that Martin Benson has directed at the Costa Mesa theater--more than that of any other playwright.

Yet the 51-year-old South Coast co-founder is more readily associated with Shaw and Synge because of the accolades heaped upon his staging of their works. “Misalliance” in 1987 and “The Playboy of the Western World” in 1985 won 14 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards between them.

“The humanness of Fugard’s plays is what lures me,” Benson said in a recent interview. “The people are so utterly real. And they are all in a situation of extremis . Fugard is a great storyteller. I don’t necessarily think he is a great poet, say, as Tennessee Williams is. But his stories are so trenchant.”

The first play by the South African playwright to draw Benson’s attention was “Blood Knot,” a primal tale of love and hate between two black brothers--one of whom can and does pass for white. Benson mounted the play in 1982. The second, staged in 1985, was “Master Harold . . . and the Boys,” a parable of shame taken from an incident in Fugard’s life.

“Fugard often writes about his own experience,” said the lanky, bearded director. “That is why he is such a great storyteller. He can take the simplest incident and construct around it, creating import and impact. But it starts with the simplest things.”

This time especially, because the central figure in “Road to Mecca” seemed to Fugard glancingly remote at first. As he has written, the seed was planted during a drive through the village of New Bethesda in the Karoo desert, 15 miles from where he was born in 1932. On a return trip to buy one of the “dirt-cheap” houses for a hideaway from the city, the playwright heard of a reclusive widow in the village considered crazy by the locals.

“They said her craziness took the form of rather silly statues and sculpture that she made and had all around her house,” Fugard wrote.

Later, he used to stroll by her house to look at her garden of statues--all facing in the direction of Mecca. But “apart from seeing her in the distance once or twice, and nodding at her,” the playwright recalled, he “never got to know her personally.”

Fugard realized, of course, that the tensions between an eccentric widow and a town alienated by her deviation from the norm would make “a damn good story.” Yet he was not hooked until years later, after she died, and an actress asked him why he “never had two women together” on stage.

Coincidentally, Fugard discovered that during the last years of her life, the woman, named Helen Martins, had developed a deep friendship with a young woman who taught in Cape Town and was rebelling against the mores of South African society at large.

“The young woman gave me . . . a photograph of herself and Miss Helen,” Fugard wrote. “I took one look . . . and there was my play.”

First staged in 1984 at Yale Repertory under Fugard’s direction, “The Road to Mecca” is set in 1974 in Miss Helen’s house. There are three characters--Miss Helen, the young teacher Elsa who arrives one night on an urgent visit, and Marius Byleveld, the pastor concerned about Miss Helen’s health.

“One of the most powerful messages in this play,” Benson said, “is the artist’s need to create. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with a palpable appreciation for art, or whether the art is good even. It has to do with a particular urge--genetic, psychological, whatever.

“But there is an implicit lesson,” he said, “that says the artist is a unique individual in society and that the artist pays an enormous price for that. There is a certain amount of isolation. There is an inevitable amount of rejection.”

More explicitly, Benson said, the drama derives its strength from the personal interplay between Miss Helen and Elsa, while tracing a thematic tangent about the moral and political climate of their country.

“Mecca” focuses, for instance, on the difference between trust and love rather than exploiting “buzz words that go off in our brain--like apartheid ,” he said.

In fact, for the first time in a major Fugard play, there are no black characters. As for villains, Benson believes the play has none, not even Marius, whose values may approximate those of Pastor Manders in Ibsen’s “Ghosts” but without his hypocritical motives.

After his most recent Mainstage outings, the lack of villainy is something of a change of pace for Benson. Last season he did Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” about the banality of evil. (It featured Nan Martin, who returns to play Miss Helen.) In September, as the SCR fall opener, he did Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” about the Salem witch trials.

“I don’t think there’s any dark moment in my soul,” he said. “There was no tie-in in my mind. I didn’t pick Miller or Fugard to satisfy some need of my psyche.”

Perhaps not. But “The Crucible,” at least, must have satisfied some need in the public’s psyche. It broke the SCR box-office record set last spring by Richard Sheridan’s 18th-Century comedy, “The School for Scandal.”

He was surprised, moreover, that “Misalliance” had also been a box-office smash--although he likes to quip that Shaw is “one of the best young writers writing today.”

“In a lot of circles,” he said, “they think of him as ‘dusty old Shaw’ and, come to think of it, a lot like Miss Helen.”