Friday, March 07, 2003 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

On the 'Road'

Actors describe working with Zakes Mokae on three-character play as intimidating experience

Director Zakes Mokae looks on while Charlene Sher and Ray Favero enact a scene from Athol Fugard's "The Road to Mecca." Photo by Christine H. Wetzel.

Ask the actors what it was like to work on Athol Fugard's play "The Road to Mecca," and one word keeps coming up: intimidating.

Not because of the intense nature of the play, which opens Thursday in the Black Box Theatre at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the fact that they are working with the words of a South African playwright in a play set in a part of the world only one member of the cast has ever been.

In this case it was the director, Zakes Mokae, that gave them pause.

"Zakes is a pussycat," said actress Jeanmarie Simpson during a recent rehearsal at Mokae's home in Las Vegas.

But ...

"It's intimidating, knowing who he is and his work, coming into this as an American actor who only knows his background. It makes you feel humble," Simpson said.

Actor Ray Favero agreed.

"I've found it really challenging," said Favero, who has appeared in numerous local productions. "I was intimidated by his background."

There's a strong South African connection to "The Road to Mecca," a three-character play.

There's South African expatriate Charlene Sher in the title role, plus fellow expats Pieter Grové creating the set design and Tom Swan handling the lighting design.

But the center of "The Road to Mecca" is held together by director Mokae, who with Fugard, a white South African, created a series of plays that held up a mirror to the evils of apartheid.

Their work, in such plays as "The Blood Knot" and "Master Harold ... and the Boys," was a challenge and a rebuke to a government built on racism and the violent repression of blacks.

After the first production of "The Blood Knot" in 1961, in which Fugard and Mokae starred as brothers, Fugard was not allowed to leave the country and Mokae was jailed.

That didn't stop them. Fugard kept writing -- his plays, including "Boesman and Lena" and "A Lesson from Aloes," have been performed in London and New York -- and Mokae left the country to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Actors who studied at the academy include Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Glenda Jackson, John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Alan Rickman and Kenneth Branagh.

Mokae won the 1982 Tony Award for his role in Fugard's "Master Harold ... and the Boys" and was featured in the films "A Dry White Season," "Cry Freedom," "The Serpent and the Rainbow" and "A World of Strangers," based on novel by Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist Nadine Gordimer.

A production of the Nevada Shakespeare Company of Reno and UNLV's Nevada Conservatory Theatre, "The Road to Mecca" is based on real-life sculptress Helen Martin (Sher), who lived in New Bethesda, South Africa, a small village where Fugard had a home.

Fugard has said his hidden agenda in writing the play "was an attempt to understand the genius, nature and consequences of a creative energy ... Miss Helen ... is actually a self- portrait. It was only after I had written the play that I realized what I had been trying to do."

Following the death of her husband, Helen began creating a sculpture garden of wise men, camels, owls and mermaids made of cement. She calls it her "Mecca." The interior of her house was decorated with myriad candles and mirrors.

Helen's friend, Elsa Barlow (Simpson), a young teacher from Cape Town, travels to visit Helen, a woman she sees in a different light than the townspeople, who think she's just an eccentric old woman.

Meanwhile, the local Calvinist minister, Marius Byleveld (Favero), arrives at Helen's house to attempt to commit her to a home for the aged.

The powerful three-character play is about the tension between a conformist Afrikaner society and someone who steps outside that society's accepted norms of behavior.

Helen committed suicide in 1976.

"The only reason people come to her village today is to see the house," said Sher, who had worked with the late Yvonne Bryceland, the first actress to play the role. "It's the only tourist attraction in the village. The play is about ageism, how a society doesn't know how to deal with eccentrics. How an old lady brought light and color into her world."

Sher and the Nevada Shakespeare Company first approached Mokae to direct a play, "Blood Knot," in 1987, but that didn't come off. Two years ago they talked to Mokae about doing "The Road to Mecca," but the Sept. 11 tragedy put that on hold. Until now.

"Doing a Fugard play with Zakes Mokae is nirvana," Simpson said. "Other people can talk academically about Fugard, but Zakes developed Fugard's works with Fugard."

Simpson said Mokae is "a real actors' director."

Favero also found him easy to work with, calling his approach "organic."

"I'm growing as an actor with this experience," Favero said.

For Mokae, who's worked with directors too numerous to mention, "there are a couple of ways of directing," he said.

There's the tell-them- exactly-where-to-move school, and then there's his approach of letting the actors do their jobs, which is "to create these roles," Mokae said. "They have to make the initial moves so they are involved in the process. It's an actors' piece. It's an experience because you travel with it."

Many of Fugard's best-known plays focus on the effects of apartheid, South Africa's (now defunct) government-directed system of racism.

"Apartheid is not overt in the play," Mokae says. "But it's still there. It's about what we do to people. You wonder if Helen is really `out there.' She says profound things most of the time. She's a scapegoat for the village."

Mokae said the actors "bring a lot of joy to the work. I have a good feeling about the play. We're discovering things together."