KOCHVILLE TWP. – A museum in a remote village in South Africa’s arid Karoo, where even in the 1970s Afrikaners — South Africans of European descent — didn’t have running water and electricity, showcases the work of a woman considered an outcast in her day.
And Friday, March 23, Saginaw Valley State University’s theater department tells the reclusive Miss Helen’s story, one that has caught the attention of Broadway in recent months through Athol Fugard’s “The Road to Mecca.”
“Her husband passed away 15 years before the story takes place, in August of 1974, and she started making art, filling her yard with statues and her home with broken glass and mirrors that reflected the candlelight at night,” said director Tommy Wedge, an adjunct professor at SVSU as he works on his masters in fine arts degree from the University of South Dakota.
Apartheid was in full swing, though it’s not specifically mentioned in Fugard’s work, Wedge said. But the attitudes prevail, almost invisible to some extent, Wedge said, because they’re simply accepted as the way things are, as recently seen in “The Help” as well.
“They are so oblivious to how discriminatory it is, almost as if they’re color-blind,” he said. “It’s not as if Miss Helen’s crusading against it but she’s not really propagating it either. Nothing here is black-and-white; you find out in the course of the play that there is no good or evil.”
And Wedge has further distanced himself from making his production a period piece on South African politics by casting Ashton Blue, an African-American student, as the conservative Rev. Marius Blyeveld. As the play unfolds, Blyeveld tries to move Miss Helen (Kiri Brasseur) to a home for the elderly while school teacher Elsa Barlow (Mykaela Hopps), her only friend, fights to keep her at home.
“When I first read the play, I honed in on apartheid,” Wedge admitted. “But in auditions, I told the students that the roles would go to the most qualified, and that was Ashton.
“We made some slight changes to the script, and delved into the relationships Miss Helen made, the two people outside of a neighbor and her husband who she considered friends.”
The story is one that already resonates with people — Wedge said he heard of a similar woman in Midland who isolated herself with her art — and opens itself to a study of light and darkness as Elsa’s friendship becomes as important to her as her art.
“She was really cut off from everyone,” Brasseur said. “Miss Helen was a widow who, instead of becoming one of the village ladies, was an outcast. I think a lot of that has to do with expectations; even today, some people regard older women who are single and don’t do the expected as strange.”
Brasseur began her research by viewing photos of Martins’ art work – “It’s really, really cool,” she said – and then trying to step in her shoes.
“Getting into this character is so different,” she said. “I’m enjoying this immeasurably more than anything I’ve done before. Think about it, only three people really visited Miss Helen in 15 years. If she didn’t have her art, she had nothing.”
And both Wedge and Brasseur saw the irony of turning Miss Helen’s humble Owl House into a “mecca” for art lovers once the play became popular. As Wedge says in his director’s notes, the community that scorned her now thrives on the thousands who visit her home.
Performing in the round in SVSU’s Black Box Theatre opens still more ways to illuminate Fugard’s work, Wedge said. Scenic designer Jerry Dennis has suspended more than 100 empty bottles at different heights, and there’s an owl, too, as a nod to her concrete-and-wire sculptures.
“It’s almost as if there are two different galleries,” Wedge said. “In the round, you can also see how the whole world lights up, the bottles and light creating that illusion.
“We chose to do it in the round, too, so that the audience could see itself in the course of the play, always surrounded by judging eyes.”
The play ends on a hopeful note, Wedge said, though Miss Helen’s story doesn’t. She committed suicide in 1976.
“Through theater, I try my best to educate audiences as well,” Wedge said. “This shows well how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.”
“The Road to Mecca,” intended for mature audiences, begins at 7:30 p.m. March 23 in the Black Box Theatre at SVSU, 7400 Bay in Kochville Township. Tickets cost $10 for adults and $7 for students and seniors 60 and older. Call the box office at 989-964-4261 for ticket availability.
Here is a walking tour of the Owl House’s gardens in Karoo:
