Rep's Road to Mecca Starts Slow, Then Ignites
Dee Maaske as Miss Helen and Marya Sea Kaminski as Elsa in Athol
Fugard’s "The Road to Mecca." Photo copyright Chris Bennion, 2009.
Set in the 1980s in the boondocks of South Africa, the story centers around the travails of Miss Helen, an aged Afrikaner, widowed some 15 years, who, since her husband's death, has shocked her rather conservative community by becoming something of an artist. Not a commercial artist, per se, but Miss Helen has still turned her once fertile garden into a menagerie of either grotesque or beautiful (depending on whose perspective we're talking about) statues, and the inside of her home, where the action takes place, has been painted with glitter that reflects the flickering light of candles that occupy nearly every surface.
Miss Helen is also quite old, and the conservative town pastor, Marius Byleveld, who she's known for 25 years and who's none too fond of her art, is trying to get her out of her house and into an old folks' home. Taking her side is Elsa, a pretty stereotypical young liberal idealist from Cape Town, who sees Miss Helen as something of an iconic free spirit. The play unfolds over the course of one night, as Miss Helen finds herself trapped between the pastor's pressure to give up her beloved home and her friend Elsa's increasingly passive-aggressive pressure to stand up for herself.
Marya Sea Kaminski's performance as Elsa was actually something of a disappointment; Kaminski is deservedly recognized as one of the most talented theatre artists in town, but in Road to Mecca her performance is more or less negligible, competent but uncompelling, which is partly why the first act dragged along so boringly. Character dramas are perhaps the hardest form of theatre (short, perhaps, of comedy), because any lacking performance can freeze them up like an engine short of oil. All the subtlety that Kaminski so powerfully gave her rendition of Rachel Corrie a couple years ago at the Rep was lacking here.
As Pastor Marius Byleveld, Terry Edward Moore does a fine job, but strangely, by the denouement, you start to wonder if the complexity of his character didn't overwhelm him. According to Elsa, he's supposed to be in love with Miss Helen, a tragic and romantic tale of decades of unrequited passion suppressed amidst the severity of conservative Afrikaner South Africa. But we didn't get any of that from his performance, and rather took away the same impression as Elsa has at first, that he's just shy of a charlatan, eager to shut up his wayward former parishioner (Miss Helen abandoned the church following her husband's death), clean up the town eyesore (he loathes her sculpture garden), and maybe make some sort of profit for the church (which has some interest in the home he wants to stick her in).
And then there's Dee Maaske, Miss Helen herself. By the time she finally explains what the hell the title's in reference to, building up her final, devastating excoriation of everything that Pastor Byleveld stands for, she had earned herself the spontaneous show-stopping ovation that interrupted act two for a couple of minutes. Seriously, damn! That she did so within the bounds of her soft-spoken, somewhat demure character is a demonstration of what great acting is. Maaske is why this show is worth seeing, Maaske dominates the entire second act, Maaske is going to be remembered come December when the other critics put together their best-of performances for the year.
And also deserving special recognition is Rachel Hauck's amazing set. The interior of the rough-and-tumble frontier home unfolds across the stage beneath the stunning panorama of South African sky, which soars away into the rafters projected across a massive cyclorama. Hauck's set captures the sense of expansiveness and desolation that underlies Miss Helen's character, and the dramatic power of the candlelight's play across the glittering walls of the little house captures some of the sense of wonder the character sees in it. Of course, from experience the set is usually the one thing we have no complaint about at the Rep, but this one deserves special commendation.
