The plays of Athol Fugard often require heavy lifting on the part of an audience. That’s particularly true of his 1987 drama The Road to Mecca, now being given its Broadway premiere in a revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company. This tale of an elderly woman artist rebuffed by her community represents the playwright at his talkiest and most didactic. Still, it has its moments of quiet beauty, and its return is welcome if only for the opportunity to see the luminous Rosemary Harris onstage.  

Director Gordon Edelstein has assembled a stellar cast for the production: Carla Gugino plays Elsa, a schoolteacher and friend of Harris’ Miss Helen, and Jim Dale is Pastor Marius Byleveld, a role that was originally played by the playwright himself.

Miss Helen is based on a true-life figure, Helen Martins, who lived in the remote Karoo region of South Africa where the play is set. At the play’s beginning, it’s established that has become a depressed, reclusive figure, shunned by her fellow villagers because her iconoclastic artworks, with which she has copiously decorated her house and garden, offend their religious sensibilities.

Her friend Elsa, concerned for her friend’s plight, has traveled hundreds of miles from Cape Town to see about Miss Helen’s health and to urge her to resist any efforts to dislodge her from her home. The play’s 65-minute first act consists of a rambling, repetitive conversation between the two, the general banality of which will tax even the most tolerant theatergoer’s patience.

Act II picks up considerably with the arrival of the pastor, who speaks to the clearly emotional fragile Miss Helen in a soothing, solicitous manner that only partially conceals the intolerance underlying his arguments.

Although this part of the play is indeed livelier, thanks in no small part to Dale’s energetic presence, it’s also filled with the sort of heavy-handed metaphors with which Fugard frequently infuses his more labored works. There’s also a lot of candle lighting—Miss Helen uses them as the sole illumination in her house, and they figure in a less than incendiary plot revelation—but the overall dimness isn’t alleviated.

Harris is, as always, exemplary here, delivering a subtle, graceful performance that touchingly makes clear her character’s underlying vulnerabilities. Gugino is appealingly feisty, and Dale provides a welcome liveliness as the pastor whose motivations are more complex than they initially appear.

Michael Yeargan has provided a wonderfully detailed, eccentric set—one that supposedly replicates the real-life subject’s home, which is now a tourist attraction—even if Peter Kaczorowski’s necessarily dim lighting, designed to replicate the effects of all those candles—makes it rather hard to see clearly.

American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300. www.roundabouttheatre.org.