Review: The Road to Mecca

Mecca

• The Road to Mecca at American Airlines TheatrePhotograph: Joan Marcus844.th.meccaREV_0.jpg24870651
• The Road to Mecca at American Airlines TheatrePhotograph: Joan Marcus844.th.meccaWEB1844.jpg24870672
• The Road to Mecca at American Airlines TheatrePhotograph: Joan Marcus844.th.meccaWEB2844.jpg24870693
• The Road to Mecca at American Airlines TheatrePhotograph: Joan Marcus844.th.meccaWEB3844.jpg24870714

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The Road to Mecca at American Airlines Theatre

Photograph: Joan Marcus

Set in a rural outpost of South Africa’s bleak Karoo region in 1974, The Road to Mecca is lit by multiple candles, as befits a play that is undeniably luminous but also, at times, a bit drippy. Athol Fugard’s Ibsenian 1985 drama addresses the plight of a creative spirit in a clime inhospitable to most things, art included. Helen (Harris), an elderly widow, has devoted the past 15 years to realizing an eccentric vision of Mecca, made manifest as statues on her lawn. This has alienated her from nearly everyone in town; her only human contact comes from her cleaning woman, her local priest (Dale) and a radical Capetown schoolteacher, Elsa (Gugino), who arrives for a visit at the start of the play, having driven 12 hours through the semidesert to help her friend through a darkling period.

Audiences must pass through a similar dry stretch at the start of The Road to Mecca, directed with a reverent air by Gordon Edelstein in the Roundabout’s Broadway space, which seems somewhat too large for the purpose. Load up on coffee before you embark on the dozy-cozy first act, a virtual sleeping draught of dim lighting, tea service and puttering exposition. Roughly 45 minutes pass before we get to the reason for Elsa’s emergency visit, and Gugino (a first-class actor) seems to be missing some of the character’s connective tissue. But the play catches fire in Act II, culminating in a beautiful speech in which Helen describes the lonely journey to her fanciful concrete Mecca. It’s Fugard at his lyrical best, and the indomitable Harris—at 84, still inspiringly sharp—delivers it with marvelous ragged dignity. You may be inclined to forgive the play’s longueurs in exchange for this eloquent reminder that all art, to some extent, is outsider art.

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