Athol Fugard`s own road to ”The Road to Mecca” began many years ago, with what he calls a series of accidents.
”I happened to discover a little village in a remote part of South Africa, where this remarkable woman, for the last 20 or 30 years of her life, had, without any training, turned herself into a sculptress.
”Outside, in her yard, were ordinary statues made out of cement. Inside, she had done something much more extraordinary. She had turned it into a palace of light. At age 50 or so, she began, and worked on this indoor and outdoor sculpture for 20 years. Two years after I met her, she committed suicide. For a long time, I kept thinking, `There`s got to be a play in this somewhere.` ”
But, Fugard says, he couldn`t find it, until, through another accident, he met a young woman in Capetown, South Africa, who had been the last close friend of the sculptress. ”She showed me a souvenir photograph of herself and the artist, and as soon as I saw the picture, that of a photo of a young South African woman, arms akimbo, looking down at this small, wizard-like old lady, and I saw the fun, love and trust between these two women, then I knew what I wanted to write about.”
But, ”as always happens,” Fugard says, ”you start writing with one central image, and the whole play turns out to be about something else.” In this case, he added a third character to his portrait of love and friendship that changed the story`s parameters and concerns. In addition to Miss Helen, the sculptress, and her young friend, Elsa, the drama, opening Wednesday at Evanston`s Northlight Theatre, also concerns Marius, a stern South African minister who, from the start of the play, is advising the aging woman to give up her home and her work and move into a nursing home, because she can no longer take care of herself.
Rev. Marius also questions Miss Helen`s eccentric sculptures and the way her avocation has made her more and more distant from the church and village society. Elsa, meanwhile, believes in Miss Helen`s work and the fulfillment it has given her. Thus, ”Road” becomes a three-way battle over Miss Helen`s freedom, both in terms of her literal independence and her right to artistic expression. With little mention of the racial strife in his country-the subject that has inspired Fugard to become one of the most celebrated and admired playwrights in the world today-he once again tackles the notion of freedom.
”I ended up writing once again about politics,” Fugard says. But he also writes about a subject near and dear to his own heart, the struggles of the artist. ”Somebody pointed out to me that all three characters are self-portraits.”
From that standpoint, Miss Helen might be taken as the dogged artist realistically aware of her limitations; Elsa, the impassioned, idealistic political activist; and Rev. Marius, the pragmatic, compromising pessimist.
”I think that might be why I`ve had such a rich experience with audiences and this play. All of my plays have enjoyed a significant measure of success, but with `Mecca,` the response has been profoundly personal. Time and again, people have come up to me and said, `We`ve liked and admired your work before, but this one we really identify with.`
”Without setting out to be personal and universal, I think somehow I pulled it off,” Fugard continues. ”While I was writing the play, I made entries in my journal-my books, I call them-and I speculated whether people outside South Africa would find these three people interesting. I`ve been given an answer in no uncertain terms. But I didn`t set out to write a play with broad appeal.”
Ironically, ”Road to Mecca” also has great personal appeal for Fugard. Several times, Miss Helen explains her artistic inspiration as something that just happens, that when she has a vision of one of her sculptures, she must drop everything and create it. She sometimes worries that these visions will stop and that she won`t be able to make any more of her statues.
”That comes from my own personal experience over 30 years,” Fugard says. ”Writing plays has been painful. Just the process of getting it down on paper. It`s the only thing I`ve wanted to do, but it`s hell. I`m writing a new play now, and the process has made me live with that fact again. One can become full of despair. Only recently, I realized I was on the wrong track and I tore up everything that I`d written. Like Miss Helen, I sometimes worry that at my age I`ve written myself out.”
In plays from ”The Blood Knot,” through ”Boesman and Lena,” ”Sizwe Bansi Is Dead” and ”Master Harold . . . And the Boys,” Fugard has been an eloquent spokesman pleading for justice in his troubled homeland. Change, however, has been slow and elusive, and yet Fugard says he is by no means bitter.
”I`ve come to a positive conclusion about the role of art in my society. I feel it has achieved, both within the country and around the world, thinking and feeling about issues which were taboo. That`s one of the great roles of theater in any embattled society. It makes people put their heads and hearts together. It encourages thinking about issues that normally would stay wrapped in political jargon, of which a system might keep its members in ignorance and from talking about at all.
”Look at the crucial role theater has played in other repressive societies, in Russia and, more recently, Czechoslovakia. In repressive societies, art has a major role, and when you have press censorship, as you do in my country, theater carries an additional burden of carrying information.
”Am I frustrated after 30 years? No. I have seen art achieve. I think it works. I wouldn`t be sitting at my desk now, flagellating myself at this occupation. But I look forward with much excitement to that date in June at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in which, hopefully, I will have an audience of all South Africans, black and white, that will consider an issue of their reality that isn`t even glossed over.
”I have great faith in the art I practice,” he adds. ”I go on being amazed at the freedom of theater.”
Fugard, 56, has acted of late, including in the off-Broadway production of ”Mecca,” playing the reverend. ”It`s dangerous. One of the great challenges threatening Athol Fugard the writer is Athol Fugard the actor. He loves being out there so much he uses up a lot of my time. But it has sharpened my awareness of what an actor needs. I try more to write for the actors, because my ultimate dependence as a writer is not on the brilliance of the lighting or scenery, but on the actor.”
Fugard has been giving interviews prior to his show`s Midwest premiere at Northlight because of a long friendship and association with the theater`s artistic director, Russell Vandenbroucke, whose work on the playwright,
”Truths the Hand Can Touch,” is considered a pioneer work.
”Russell is a deeply loved friend,” Fugard says. ”Somebody with whom I`ve had the most wonderful time exchanging about the craft. I don`t think he knows how much courage he`s given me at crucial moments of my life, when I was feeling low and uncertain and he came through with a letter that was right on target. I`m told the book he wrote about me is very good, but of course I haven`t read it. I don`t read anything about myself, noteven reviews. That would be an invitation to self-consciousness.”
