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The stage of Roundabout's American Airlines Theatre, where The Road to Mecca opened Jan. 17, is scrupulously under-lit by lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski, who employs a dozen or so flickering candles on stage around a luminous, lit-from-within Rosemary Harris.

The 84-year-old actress, in a real bear of a role, plays "Miss Helen" Martins, an Afrikaner widow who has spent the past 15 years cluttering her garden with sculptures she has created out of a suddenly freed imagination. They are viewed with alarm as pagan artifacts by her provincial neighbors in the small village of New Bethesda in the Karoo desert region of South Africa. The glares and gossiping bring on "a darkness inside" that inhibits her creatively. Small boys throw stones at her.

The real story of "Miss Helen" has a more tragic end than is presented here — fearing her art and freedom will be taken from her, she suicides — but one of her neighbors, Athol Fugard, has provided her a happy ending that life denied her and scored a few salient points against the oppressive apartheid government of the time.

After the play, Harris betrayed no loss of radiance. If anything, the experience seemed to energize her — and she generously received all who came her way.

"I was looking forward to it for the first time," she said. "Most opening nights you don't look forward to that much, but I sorta knew we had something lovely to show, to reveal. It was not just me. I knew they would eat Jim up — and Carla, my gosh!

"It's all thanks to Athol, you know. It was wonderful having him here. He came towards the end of our rehearsals, and he was so helpful. When we asked him specific questions, he would just say, 'Oh, no. Do whatever you like.' He doesn't guard his precious text, which, of course, he should do because it's sublime."

View the Entire Photo Gallery Carla Gugino Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

So what is it like to have 60 uninterrupted minutes on stage with Rosemary Harris? "It's a dream, it's a blessing and it's a blast," Gugino responded. "She's really incredible, and we have so much fun. I respect her so much, but I think most of all what I respect about her is what an incredible and generous human being she is."

Her other blessing was having Fugard around. "He's extraordinary. As a person, what I was so taken with is that he is such a humanist. He really is. He is deeply connected to his own emotions. He's incredibly gifted, and he's super-passionate so that every time he has a thought or an observation, it comes from a really human perspective. His voice has been quite heard in this production, that's for sure."

Where Fugard didn't have any weight and sway was Dale's accent. Even though Fugard also acts and indeed played Byleveld previously, Dale saw fit not to emulate the playwright's manner of speaking. "It's so bloody broad I couldn't possibly use his normal accent. There is a time when you can use an accent that's so broad and you're so good at it — that the audience can't understand one word, and that's wrong. Everybody in that audience is entitled to hear every word you're saying."

Instead, Dale borrowed the accent of the lead in "District 9, a film about a spacecraft over Johannesburg. "I watched it three or four times — that's how the accent began."

This role is close to a villain as Dale has come, but you may not notice because he plays it lightly like a Bible-Belt Barnum, conning people into his own agenda. His natural lightness leaves the distinct impression that he is doing the role for the first time. "It should be that way," he contended. "It's the first time that the audience is seeing the play so it should look like it's the first time that you're doing it."