Studio Theatre’s The Road To Mecca can be a tense, devastating play, but it comes most alive when its characters are laughing.

The playful, joyous friendship between an older artist and a young teacher in South Africa is the heart of Athol Fugard’s play (also a film starring Kathy Bates). Their bond is one to envy, one where the two women challenge each other, inspire each other and make each other feel like children again — the younger of the pair, Elsa, says as much herself in one of the work’s most impassioned speeches. The duo is played with commanding strength and bursts of vulnerability by Holly Twyford as Elsa and Tana Hicken as her mentor, whose command over her life is being tested by the trials of age, the darkness of depression and a meddling pastor (Martin Rayner) who doubts her ability to care for herself.