About the Play:

The Road to Mecca has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

The Road to Mecca is a full-length drama by Athol Fugard. In a desolate stretch of the Karoo Desert in South Africa, an elderly woman has turned her home into a highly personal work of art. The townspeople are threatened by her eccentricity and want to send her to an old age home, but a younger woman, a kindred spirit, wants to save the woman and her home.

The Road to Mecca was inspired by the story of Helen Martins, who lived in Nieu-Bethesda, Eastern Cape, South Africa and created The Owl House, now a National Heritage Site. A South African pastor and a young teacher from Cape Town battle over the fate of an eccentric elderly widow. This unusual drama by a premiere contemporary dramatist focuses on Miss Helen, an old Boer woman who lives alone in the South African boondocks where she creates odd concrete sculptures which she calls her Mecca. A young woman who was once helped by Miss Helen has traveled hundreds of miles to help her in a time of crisis Miss Helen is in danger of being sent to an old folks' home by a narrow minded minister who considers her sculptures a public nuisance. A penetrating study of the role of the artist in any society, this important play was produced in London and New York to great critical acclaim.

The Road to Mecca premiered in 1984 at Yale Repertory Theatre, the internationally celebrated professional theater in residence at Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut. The play premiered off-Broadway in 1988 at the Promenade Theatre, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle award for Best Foreign Play, and on Broadway in 2011 at American Airlines Theatre.

Cast: 1 female, 2 male

What people say:

"The author's most personal play to date, an essential rosetta stone for the entire canon." — New York Times

"Glows with a rare luminosity and intensity. Athol Fugard's latest play ... is also his most eloquent and transforming." — Christian Science Monitor

"One of Fugard's simplest, most beautiful plays." — New York Daily News

About the Playwright:

Athol Fugard (1932-2025) was an internationally acclaimed South African playwright whose work deals with the political and social upheaval of the apartheid system in South Africa. In a career that spanned 70 years, he wrote more than 30 plays that are regularly performed in theatres in South Africa, Great Britain, the United States and around the world. Several of his plays have been adapted for the screen and his novel Tsotsi was made into a film that won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2011 he received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre, while Time magazine described him in the 1985 as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world.