Bumpy Ride on Playhouse’s ‘Road to Mecca’

After a performance during the world premiere run of “The Road to Mecca” at Yale Repertory Theatre in the late ‘80s, Athol Fugard said “Mecca” was something new for him. The South African playwright felt his prior works had said everything he had to say against apartheid.

You can’t get rid of an obsessive social subject that easily.

“The Road to Mecca,” at the Camino Real Playhouse, doesn’t, it is true, deal with apartheid per se. But it does closely examine the mind-set that continued that racial injustice and that condones its fallout to this day in South Africa, just as racism remains an American shame.

That mind-set--the tunnel vision that can only see a future for those who fit into a mold created by the socially empowered--is embodied in the character of Marius Byleveld, the dominie and social arbitrator of the village of New Bethesda in South Africa’s Great Karoo. He is kindly, understanding and a great friend of Miss Helen’s.

What Byleveld can’t accept is Miss Helen’s dedication to the construction of concrete statues of Wise Men, owls and various other images in her garden, all pointing east toward Mecca. She is different. The villagers can’t accept her, either. They want her like them--or they want her destroyed by placing her in an old-folks home.

It is this frightening and frightened attitude against those who are different that is at the core of racism and of Fugard’s drama. This production, under Nancy Jane Smeets’ direction, almost misses that point in the director’s casting of Odette Derryberry as Miss Helen.

Derryberry acquits herself quite well as far as she goes, but she lacks the hard spine of a woman who, like Simon Rodia and his Watts Towers, fought community opinion and official obstinateness for a dream that was both mystic and personal. Derryberry’s own aura is gentle, making Miss Helen befuddled rather than torn, disenchanted rather than disenfranchised. This casting turns the play into a story about whether or not to put away a dotty old lady, instead of one about taking away the freedom of the only spiritually free person in town.

Smeets has staged the piece effectively--despite the too open, boxy setting (albeit decorated nicely in Miss Helen’s eccentric style)--but hasn’t captured the suspense, tension and mystery of the script. These are ingredients that mark the exceptional writing of Fugard, the depth beneath the simplicity of his surface.

Some of that quality, and all of the power of this flawed but valid production of the play, is in the performances of Jill Cary Martin as Elsa Barlow, the young woman who has befriended and become intimate with the driven widow, and Gene Fiskin as Byleveld.

Martin has a gritty texture that fulfills the total honesty of her Elsa, which finds its source in the text despite Derryberry’s softness. And Fiskin’s sense of respectability and purpose barely cover his inner fear of Miss Helen’s mystic journey and the peace it has brought her, a spiritual peace Byleveld cannot conceive.

No, Fugard was not, and is not, done with racism or bigotry--even as society tries to reconstruct itself--in “Mecca” or in such a more evolved example of his art as “Playland,” which just opened at South Coast Repertory. (Review, F1). A comparison of the two dramas shows how far we have gone, but how short a distance we have traveled.

* “The Road to Mecca,” Camino Real Playhouse, 31776 El Camino Real, San Juan Capistrano. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 13, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 19. $10. (714) 489-8082. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

Jill Cary Martin: Elsa Barlow

Gene Fiskin: Marius Byleveld

Odette Derryberry: Miss Helen

A South Orange County Community Theatre production of the drama by Athol Fugard. Directed by Nancy Jane Smeets. Lighting design: Michelle Evans. Stage manager: K. Robert Eaton.