Stage:

...For Elsa, who teaches in a "colored" school where she tries to subvert the system by teaching her pupils to think, Helen's statues are a revolution-ary statement aimed at her closed Afrikaner world...

...Most of the first act consists of talk between Helen and Elsa, often revisiting common ground, and the going is slow, even when two excellent performers try to mask exposition as comradeship...

...There was some talk of the production's being moved to New York, but Fugard's preoccupation with Mecca apparently forestalled that...

...Fugard, as a playwright, knows that no artist reaches his Mecca...

...Carmen Mathews, as Helen, did that marvelously affecting throat-catch of hers in all the right places, but the character never really took shape...

...She does both things very well...

...Marius, who says he has never seen such happiness in her, accepts that he has lost Helen to her creations, and who has read her own aggressiveness into Helen's statues, suc-cumbs to Helen's strength and joy, takes comfort for the emptiness and loss in her own life...

...Despite the fascinating concept at the heart of The Road to Mecca and a wonderfully electric second act, the play has difficulties which suggest that it has not reached its Mecca...

...Fugard often has his characters telling each other what they already know, but in a play like Master Harold . . . and the Boys, for instance, the process is dramatically effective because it establishes a ritual of recollection which the action of the play will destroy...

...But the character would be intolerable if it were not for the moments in which Bryceland abruptly drops the register of her voice, hinting at the steel in Helen, promis-ing the burst of strength that will eventually come and carry the play to its vibrant finish...

...When she finally finds her voice and describes what the sparkling lights on her walls and the giant figures in her yard mean to her-visions made real, light fighting against the spiritual darkness in which she has lived-both Marius and Elsa retreat...

...Marius, who distrusts and fears Helen's creations, wants to rescue her from her home (she has been burned in a fire started by her candles) and put her into an old folks home...

...Add that Yvonne Bryceland scurries around like Miss Mousie through much of the first act and crumples before a dominating Marius at the beginning of the second...

...STAGE ALMOST COMMITTED 'THE ROAD TO MECCA' When Athol Fugard' s The Road to Mecca was first produced at Yale in 1984, it was both stiff (particularly in Tom Aldredge's performances as Marius) and oddly amorphous...

...Although commentators on the play (see Mel Gussow in the New York Times, April 24) tend to see Fugard as siding with Elsa, the real conflict in the play, as the second act makes clear, is between Helen and two people who love her...

...While The Road to Mecca was being readied for New York, an excellent production of Fugard's Statements about an Arrest under the Immorality Act was playing at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia with Michael Rogers and Kate Skinner (in the role created by Yvonne Bryceland in Cape Town and London) as the interracial couple...

...Fugard was directing his own play, but his presence in a production as performer or director is never a guarantee that the play will work as well as it should, as the eviscerated version of The Blood Knot illustrated in the 1985 revival of that excellent play...

...for Marius, they are a kind of obsession which he tries to belittle by calling them her "hobby...

...Too bad, for the Wilma Statements deserved a wider audience, and it would have been rewarding to have two helpings of Fugard for hungry New York audiences...

...GERALD WEALES...

...The latter is a widow, shunned as an eccentric by the people she grew up with...

...Elsa, who has driven a long, grueling distance in response to what she hears in Helen's letter as a cry for help, tries to save her or to persuade her to save herselfby not signing the papers...

...Bryceland and Fugard have been working together for more than twenty-five years, since their days at The Space in Cape Town, and anyone who was lucky enough to see the film version of Boesman and Lena (1973), which was occasionally visible but never proper-ly distributed in this country, knows how well they work together...

...The Road to Mecca takes place in the Karoo, a semi-arid area in central South Africa, in an Afrikaner village, probably rather like the one in which Fugard's mother was raised...

...Statements is a fine evocation of two people drawn to one another despite the legal restrictions designed to keep them apart and of the way in which their love, need, uncertainty, guilt, and fear play through their speeches...

...Helen, who almost signed the commitment papers because she was afraid that she would never work at her art again, knows now that she must hang on where she is, hoping to be reanimated by a new image de-manding form but knowing that she will never reach the Mecca of her mind...

...In Mecca, the women too often seem to be simply telling the audience what it needs to know...

...like Helen, the best he can do is to stay on the road in that direction...

...Now The Road to Mecca has finally come to New York...

...After the death of her husband, Helen began to construct strange statues, which designer John Lee Beatty happily leaves to our imagination-camels and wisemen, owls and mer-maids-which fill her yard, facing toward Mecca, a place that exists only in Helen's mind, not to be confused with the holy city in Saudi Arabia...

...Ostensibly, at least, the play is a struggle between Marius, the local clergyman, and Elsa, who is English and urban, for the body and perhaps the soul (spirit, at least) of Helen...

...Fugard is not only directing but playing Marius, and Yvonne Bryceland, making her American debut, is Helen, a role that was written for her...

...She has also covered the walls of her house with bits of broken glass, which sparkle like jewels when the candles play on them at night...

...In this production of Mecca, they are joined by Amy Irving, giving a characteristically strong performance as Elsa, Helen's young friend and would-be protector...