Athol Fugard’s ‘The Road to Mecca’

In real life, outsider artist Helen Martins ground green bottles into glittery shards and applied them in a thick paste to bedroom walls. By candlelight, she was surrounded by facets of glimmer and shimmer. Amber bottle shards transformed her living room, and a ground-glass owl mosaic, celestially situated, twinkled above the evening’s lamp-lit comings and goings. Once her interiors were replete, she moved out into her yard and began sculpting with glass and concrete. Townspeople became threatened by the primitive, passionate figures they began to see being born in her sculpture garden or “camel yard,” all oriented toward the East.

In “The Road to Mecca,” playwright Athol Fugard, an Afrikaaner, explores the life’s work and artistic visions of the “lapsed” churchgoer and 70-year-old Martins, a fellow Afrikaaner. His working play borrows heavily from her artistic leadings and interrogations. Their concerns about inspiration, risk-taking and art-making clearly share parallels, and her life seems ripe for appropriation to further his dramatic pursuits.

“The Road to Mecca” is symbol-rich, filled with tensions, illusion and allusions. It’s an ambitious undertaking for community theater. The Garrison Players’ production, running through May 20 in Rollinsford, rises to the challenge nicely, matching well their creative voices and visuals to Fugard’s vision, which is, in fact, a brilliance borrowed from Martins.
Our setting is South Africa’s high desert, the Karoo, in a little township. Living alone and isolated after being widowed, Martins (played brilliantly by Peggi McCarthy) begins to have illuminations. Though unschooled as an artist, Martins is spiritually attuned to these visions. Once they are fully formed in her mind’s eye, she begins to execute them artistically, creating giant owls, camels, mermaids and giraffes, all of which face Mecca. This creates a stir in her community, as many folks consider her work odd, discomforting or outright idolatrous.

Martin’s paintings, collages and large-scale concrete sculpture explore our relationship to wisdom (she was an obsessive maker of owls and things owlish). The play investigates her own and black Africans’ relationship to the church and its community politics and strictures (imposed by its inordinate wealth). In Fugard’s play, we see Martins turn away from the missionary zeal of the Afrikaaner Church and toward Mecca (an impulse more akin to transcendentalism on the veldt than the Muslim Hajj). Using Martins as a lens, we see Fugard explore the relationships between men and women, old and young, the free and the proscribed.

Set designer Eddie Langlois understands the stage from all angles: backstage, onstage, audience’s stage picture. His brilliantly designed set uses gorgeous deep reds, verdant greens, gold and peach. Splashes of reflective mylar pave parts of the stage and light springs up with lovely effects. Three large resplendent papier mâché owls adorn the stage, a marriage of sacred animal, familiar and gargoyle. A giant blue cat reminiscent of Picasso, Van Gogh and anime graces stage left. Three handsome giraffes, swaddled in resonant greens of African veldt, kiss and nuzzle under a purple sun, a ribbon of river in the foreground.

The very fine art brut of Doug Desjardins makes manifest these passions of Martins, creating the visual representation of her inner life. Langlois was thrilled to stumble upon Desjardins’ work. He explains art brut, or what the French call “undisciplined art,” as “not working solely by the tenets, as staying personal, as an art that comes from oneself and not necessarily the study of line, form, contour and color.”

Desjardins and Langlois met at the Salmon Falls Mills in Rollinsford, where each has a studio. Desjardins actually is schooled—he’s a recent BFA graduate from Plymouth State University—and has an excellent and expressive sense of color and composition. Yet his work looks effortless, childlike. It’s big, full of joy and exuberance, slap-dash on big sheets of plywood, old luaun doors, castoff boards and furniture. Desjardins was clearly awed, seeing the set for the first time on opening night. His work lends an emotional intensity that moves the set from theater space to overall environment. Almost as if he had been preparing for this show for years, his body of work held multiple giraffes, owls, goddesses, mermaids and smiling big cats, which Langlois used playfully but judiciously. Desjardins also painted the papier mâché owls and giraffes with his signature style.

Martins’ world of light, shadow and sparkle enchants the visiting Elsa Barlow, (played by the exceptionally well-modulated Sarah Bailey), a young teacher and social change worker who lives in the city 800 miles distant. Contrary to the community response, she finds Martins’ work fascinating, enlivening and exemplary of spirit made manifest, and they strike up a friendship punctuated by letters and visits. Martins and Barlow’s relationship is complex in the ways they both challenge and nurture each other. They take turns defining the parameters and the poles of female passion. The play’s working is about how their passion gets channeled toward artistry, risk-taking, personal desire and social justice.

When an accident at Martins’ house provides the community an impetus for promiting her from estranged to cast-out, Martins calls upon Barlow for help and support. In a particularly difficult letter, she describes how sad, desperate and lonely she sometimes feels. It’s been a long time since a vision has come and Martins fears her art-making may be coming to an end.  Barlow, concerned, comes to visit, but she is entwined in her own struggles.

Martins’ former spiritual teacher, Marius Byleveld (played most sternly and scarily by Alan Huisman) attempts to serve as a community intermediary or good Samaritan, but fails miserably, as he hasn’t the faintest idea what motivates Martins’ artistic expressions or their meaning for her. He refers to her work as “personal items” born from a “hobby,” while, in fact, these creations are her guiding passion and animate her entire life. A shepherd with crook and cross, he’s attempting to bring Helen back within control of the flock in a retirement community, which Barlow fears will be the end of her. As Langlois shares, “Helen’s need for solitude and the privacy of the soul highlights the challenge of the art maker who is misunderstood.” Marius would like her spiritual yearnings focused elsewhere, but Barlow fights for those yearnings and for the truths they express to remain uncircumscribed. Martins’ mentor needs to know why and how to fight, and why a passion-driven life is worth the risk. Martins’ perceived flightiness is contradicted by Barlow’s resilience. Their reliance on one another helps each to earn a measure of triumph at play’s end.

In real life, however, Martins, at almost 80, committed suicide by drinking caustic soda otherwise used for cleaning concrete and tiles. Speculations are diverse; failing eyesight due to ground glass damage, advanced arthritis, struggles with depression and loss of independence get consideration in both life and Fugard’s play. In truth, it will always be a mystery. Her art gives the best clues to her revelatory visions and their worshipfulness that stands apart from any constraining tradition of religiosity. She left behind a startling and powerful vision of her world, a vision larger than life.
Fugard’s dilemma as a dramaturge investigating race, power and culture in South Africa is akin to Helen’s in her cultural interrogation. Literature professor Dennis Walder writes of Fugard, “as an actor, director and playwright, he is obsessed with the idea that what he has to say can only be said indirectly, as an image, embodied in the ‘living moment’ onstage.” This matches Helen’s reverent art-making impulses, as well, and her despair in the play is in failing this. Fugard furthers, in an abstract way, Helen Martins’ monument, by putting more words in her mouth. One of the fun coincidences on the set is a Desjardins painting wherein a lone figure in silhouette ponders as handfuls of words spilling to the ground form the land upon which he makes his stand.