Sam Shepard’s last work of the twentieth century, The Late Henry Moss, returns to the first subjects that long ago shaped the playwright’s moral imagination. The play, Shepard says, “concerns another predicament between brothers and fathers and it’s mainly the same material I’ve been working over for thirty years or something, but for me it never gets old.”1 The familiar material, of course, negotiates the problematic condition of the American family and its wayward inhabitants. As seen in so many Shepard plays, questions of heredity, legacy, and legitimacy animate the stage, as do the status of the real and the ways in which the individual subjectivizes his or her own version of reality. Competing versions of reality, conflicting accounts of what precisely happened to Henry Moss and others who came within his orbit in the days preceding his demise fill the stage. The drama raises debates about individual, familial, and cultural identity and memory, as it does about the relationship between abstract and concrete experience, fiction and reality, and, ultimately, about coming to terms with death itself. Shepard layers such debates with additional complexity and ambiguity by presenting the play’s lead character as a ghost. As Shepard explains, The Late Henry Moss concerns “the father, who is dead in the play and comes back, who’s revisiting the past. He’s a ghost – which has always fascinated me.”2 This is a play about a dead man walking. It is equally a play about a family afflicted by the inevitability of their lamentable biological and spiritual fate. Whereas in the earlier Pulitzer Prize play the buried child never had a chance to live, the about-to-be buried father in The Late Henry Moss lived for nearly seven decades, though his phantasmic presence redefines antiheroism.
Apparitions, waif-like beings, and corpses occasionally infiltrate Shepard’s stages. They assume, of course, differing forms: as Ghost Girl in The Mad Dog Blues (1971); or as the Old Man in Fool for Love (1983), who “exists only in the minds of Mae and Eddie”;3 or as Henry Hackamore in Seduced (1978), who, murdered at play’s end, keeps repeating, “I’m dead to the world but I never been born.”4 In the brief one-act The Holy Ghostly (1970), spectral presences are even more direct. Witches inform the father, Stanley Hewitt Moss the sixth (surely a relative of Henry Moss), “You’re already dead, Mr. Moss”;5 “You’re a ghost, Mr. Moss” (189). By the end of The Holy Ghostly, his transubstantiation complete, Moss sees himself only as an anesthetized, “bloodless critter” (195). The Late Henry Moss, however, represents a turning point within Shepard’s oeuvre. The play, Shepard notes, differs from his earlier dramas in that “it specifically deals with death. I’ve never directly dealt with that. The other [plays] have that peripherally, but this is the centerpiece of it.”6
Shepard, who directed the Magic Theatre’s 14 November 2000 premiere (staged at a larger venue, the 750-seat Theatre on the Square in San Francisco), assembled a memorable cast, many of them Hollywood friends. Nick Nolte and Sean Penn starred as the troubled sons, the elder booze-weary Earl and the edgy younger Ray, respectively, and James Gammon played their beleaguered father and title character. Woody Harrelson, as a humorously reluctant and frightened cab-driver named Taxi, and Cheech Marin, as a benevolent neighbor named Esteban, emerged as humorous figures who, when appropriate, worked the crowd for laughs. In an evocative performance, Sheila Tousey was Conchalla Lupina, Henry’s mysterious and voracious Indian girlfriend. T-Bone Burnett provided quiet Spanish-inflected acoustic guitar solos, which complemented Anne Militello’s haunting lighting effects. The play sold out for its seven week run. The night I attended a pair of tickets went for $900 on the street. The play drew mixed reactions, though most of the reviewers, apparently unable to address the play’s complexities, wrote mainly about its stars.
When theatregoers settled into their seats, they saw a stage that at first glance seemed fairly unremarkable. As a framing device, though, Andy Stacklin’s set provided a richly symbolic point of entry into Shepard’s play. Within the yellowish “rough plastered walls,” as Shepard specifies in his stage directions, there are a “mesquite door” and a “cot-like bed” which contains the corpse of Henry Moss.7 In addition to the claw-footed bathtub upstage, there is the kitchen, with “a sink, stove, and small refrigerator set against the upstage wall.” Downstage are “two metal S-shaped chairs” next to a Formica table, on which sit a bottle of bourbon, plastic cups, cigarettes, and an ashtray “in the shape of a rattlesnake.” While most reviewers simply overlooked the stage arrangements, one commenting on the set diminished its importance: “Whatever the audience paid to get in,” John Lahr wrote, “it was more than the producers seem to have shelled out for the set: a run-down adobe dwelling, with a bathtub on a platform and little else.”8 Whatever the cost of the set, Shepard worked carefully to ensure a semiotic of play space that reveals much about the hardscrabble life of its occupant. It is not for nothing that Shepard insists that above Henry’s corpse is “a small barred window” that makes part of the home look “like a jail cell.”
The Late Henry Moss revolves around the recent passing of the play’s title character. His two estranged sons find themselves reunited after years apart, drawn by the death of their alcoholic father to his simple adobe located near the outskirts of Bernalillo, New Mexico. As the play begins, Earl thumbs through a family photograph album while Ray examines a wrench in an old red tool chest. Their father’s body lies in rest in a small anterior bedroom. While taking care of burial arrangements, the brothers immerse themselves in present confrontations and past recollections, sometimes reconstituted through flashback sequences, that reveal not only what may have happened to Henry Moss during his last days but also what transpired years ago within the Moss family. Thus spatially and temporally, the play at times unwinds in a nonrealistic, and nonlinear, form. Moreover, the authority of Shepard’s text and its performance is negotiable. Brothers immediately contradict each other. Accusations of “mis-remembering things” fly. There is, if you prefer, a rupture between the signifier and the signified. Whose version of reality do we accept? Whose version seems legitimate? This organic contingency of what Michael Issacharoff and Robin F. Jones would call the “performing text”9 – its openness to theatrical and textual negotiations, the poignancy of its conflicting dialogues, its shifting accounts of past action and present consequence, the ways in which Shepard arranges language and nuances stage directions, its very performativity – not only gives The Late Henry Moss its classic Shepardian texture, but its theatrical largess and, most significantly, its currency and purchase on a postmodernist culture.
The Late Henry Moss, for some, may be viewed as autobiography. The parallels between Shepard’s father and Henry Moss – the alcoholism, the shattering of doors and windows, the violence against wives and the attendant emotional injuries exacted upon children, the move from Illinois to New Mexico, the sheer implacable sense of anger that so consumes them, fathers who served in the air force, patriarchs who do not recognize their own children, the ignoble deaths of the fathers, and so on – invite such linkages. And Shepard limned personal experiences for imaginative materials both before and after his own father’s death in 1984. Yet, despite the allure of interconnecting autobiography with The Late Henry Moss and the other “family” plays, Shepard has never been “an autobiographical writer in the simple sense of dramatising his own experiences.”10 In fact, the most remarkable feature about The Late Henry Moss is its compelling presentation of a series of events which suddenly broaden to encompass experiences felt by too many audiences: the never-seen mother, the father, and the sons emerge as bewildered figures, in the specifics of whose confrontations Shepard sets forth the entropic condition of the American family. Shepard’s play, while regionally specific and very much about the Henry Jamison Moss family, is also informed by a larger cultural critique of the family in any part of the United States. Our conflicted sensory perceptions and experiences interfuse with Shepard’s scripted performance and conflicted performers. The Late Henry Moss invites the audience to explore an extratheatrical reality as Shepard plays, and replays through flashbacks, public and private structures of theatricality itself and the society it reflects.
On the surface, the drama’s past events seems simple, if horrific, enough. One fateful evening a quarter of a century ago, Henry assaulted his wife, kicking her into a bloody husk. Clearly the family never recovered from this defining moment. Henry recalls, “She was on the floor . . . I remember the floor – was yellow – and – her blood – was smeared across it like – orange butterflies. She was surrounded – by butterflies and – I thought I’d killed her . . . She kept – peering out at me through her swollen eyes. She just stayed there – under the sink. Silent. Balled up like an animal. Nothing moving but her eyes.” Stunned by his own savagery, Henry abrogates claims to familial duty and Emersonian self-reliance: “I ran. I ran to the car and I drove. I drove for days with the windows wide open.” Despite his howling that reaches a metaphysical poignancy by the third act, the fact remains that Henry Moss never apologizes for nearly murdering his wife. She remains “that little shit” who “caused me to leave! She caused me to pack on outa’ there! Whatdya’ think? You think I wanted to wander around this godforsaken country for twenty some years like a refugee? Like some miserable fuckin’ exile? That’s what she did to me! She banished me! She turned me out! [. . . .] She locked me out!!!!” Only at the final curtain will Henry gain perspective regarding his exiled condition and the depth of his idiocy. Henry fathoms only seconds before lapsing into his final death that, at the precise moment he assaulted his wife, he transformed himself from the present Henry Moss to the late Henry Moss. Within the imaginative logic of Shepard’s play, physical death twenty-five years later is a mere formality.
The Mosses emerge as characters whose very identities are under assault. For the blood-soaked mother nearly beaten to death, “identity” has been rendered invisible by a wayward husband whose anger gains its demented energy from drink and insecurity. In text and performance, she never appears in a flashback scene. Nor does she speak for herself in the present. She remains nameless. All the audience learns is that Henry used and abused her. We learn nothing else about her. For Earl, the elder son who lacked the courage to protect his mother, who ran in terror that fateful evening, and whose actions eerily replicate his father’s throughout the play, “identity” is submerged by guilt over his mother’s demise and, now, by alcohol that keeps at bay his shame. With their mother lying near death, Earl sped off in his 1951 Chevy, never to be heard from for years. Shepard provides few other details about his past. In the present, the hulking and besotted Earl exudes a sad world-weariness. He seems content to ignore his own fallibility and to forgive and accept his father – and his passing – at face value. As he says to his brother, it is “not like we’re inheriting a legacy here.”
He is wrong. “We’re bound up!” Henry Moss screams. “We’re flesh and blood, you idiot!” These brothers are the beneficiaries of their family’s history. So for Ray, the skittish younger son, “identity” has been under pressure from the (de)formative experience of watching the family disintegrate and his own subsequent withdrawal. Too young to defend his mother and traumatized by the beating and subsequent abandonment of family by his elder male figures, he also ran from home. He used to work on cars with his father’s tools; now he makes ends meet by playing the clarinet at a Ramada Inn. Although he wears a Hawaiian shirt, black leather jacket, and blue leather-tipped shoes, Ray appears withdrawn and paranoid. Ray seems consumed by a desire to stand up for a mother he could not protect as a boy, as if now he might make amends for the sins of the past. At best, however, he can only mop the kitchen floor in the third act with his older brother, just as the father mopped the bloody floor with their mother before. Within Ray’s world of attenuated options, retribution comes too late. Expiation remains a distant force. These family members emerge as damaged figures whose only remarkable feature, Shepard suggests, is their own insignificance in the universe. As Ray says to Taxi, “You’re nothing. Just like me. An empty nothing. A couple of nothings whose lives have never amounted to anything and never will.”
For Henry, “identity” seems buried in a maze of denials and rationalizations. After all, he reasons, “What did I ever do to deserve this? I’ve led an honorable life for the most part! Few slip-ups now and then but – for the most part – I’ve served my country. I’ve dropped bombs on total strangers! Paid my taxes. Worked my ass off for idiots. There’s never once been any question of my – existence. It’s humiliating!” Defining his identity, however, remains as problematic as it is disturbing. Henry lives for years in his adobe, remaining drunk enough to blot out a past that forever emotionally paralyzes him. Only outsiders – Esteban, the kindly Mexican neighbor who long ago befriended and still feeds Henry, and Conchalla, Henry’s enigmatic girlfriend he met while both were in the local jail’s drunk tank – know much about Henry’s recent existence.
The genesis of Henry’s character in part came from Shepard’s desire to write about his father’s death. He wanted, apparently, to put his felt experiences onto page, and then stage, before too much time intervened. Aesthetically, inspiration for The Late Henry Moss may be traced back to a short story written by Frank O’Connor, “The Late Henry Conran,” which appeared in the Irish writer’s first collection of fiction, Guests of the Nation (1931). In O’Connor’s piece, Henry Conran, having “the biggest appetite for liquor of any man,”11 quarrels with his wife, Nellie, and finds himself locked out of his own home. Conran exiles himself to Chicago, where he lives for twenty-five years until learning that, in a marriage announcement for one of his sons, he has been pronounced dead. His pride wounded, character defamed, reduced to a spectral presence, Conran returns to Ireland, ready legally to charge Nellie with a defamation of character suit unless she restores, as he bellows, “the character ye took from me.”12 Whereas the Shepard play oscillates between mystery and menace, laughter and loss, while building toward an indeterminate ending, the O’Connor piece embraces more directly comedy and acceptance, resolution and closure. The story ends with implied renewal, for upon seeing her husband finally home and in their bed, Nellie’s eyes shine “in her head with pure relief.”13 Conran lives. It is difficult to locate “pure relief” in Shepard’s work. The play ends ambiguously. Moss dies. This is not, by design, the well-made fable.
Despite differences in narrative complexity and closure, The Late Henry Moss and “The Late Henry Conran” share important qualities. For O’Connor’s fiction, like Shepard’s play, is not merely about a lush who runs away from home, but about the condition of the individual who, once exiled from his familiar surroundings, becomes a stranger, a cosmic drifter, an apparition in his own diminished ether world. Both O’Connor and Shepard present voracious protagonists who cannibalize themselves and family by a willful relinquishment of moral nerve. Seeking spiritual fulfillment, or at least understanding, they instead fill themselves with spirits. They are, to use Shepard’s phrase, “professional drunk[s].”14 These are men tormented by a dimly perceived inability to maintain contact with those with whom they could, or should, be intimate. In effect, they transform psychologically and spiritually to ghosts, suspended between a kind of heaven and hell, at least until a secular or cosmic reckoning may brook purgation, a cleansing of the soul so that soul may find its rightful place in the universe.
In addition to the O’Connor influence, traces of The Late Henry Moss reveal themselves in a short story Shepard initially wrote in 1989, “See You in My Dreams.” Appearing in his remarkable collection of fiction, Cruising Paradise (1996), the story unwinds in the same small town as the play and features similar characters and narrative patterns – the drunkard father, a Mexican neighbor named Esteban, a large, mysterious Indian girlfriend who goes trout fishing with the father during his last days on earth, abandoned offspring, the father’s death, and so on. Significantly, the story foregrounds central issues that underpin The Late Henry Moss: an unresolved past, the violent history between the father, mother, and son, and the attendant overwhelming terror – “The same fear that invaded me at his [the father’s] door when he was alive,” as the narrator reports.15 After working intermittently on The Late Henry Moss for ten years, Shepard revisited these origins while shaping his new play. Not surprisingly, Ray reflects, “I remember the very last thing he [his father] said to me . . . ‘See you in my dreams.’”
In the manuscript draft of the play, Shepard provides a pre-text to his text, a revelatory epigraph from O’Connor’s story: “’Tis no crime to be dead.” This richly encoded epigraph appears at an emotional highpoint in the short story, and to understand this moment in the narrative is to discover the broader personal and cultural dynamics of O’Connor’s work and, by extension, Shepard’s play. Henry Conran, furious that he has been pronounced dead and thus denied a voice, listens to his friend Larry Costello explain: “‘And anyway, as I said before,’tis only a manner of speaking. A man might be stone dead, or he might be half dead, or dead to you and me, or, for that matter of that, he might be dead to God and the world as we’ve often been to ourselves.’”16 O’Connor’s reflections are variants of the well-known spiritual death-in-life motif saturating the fictions of many of his Irish contemporaries, including George Moore, Seumus O’Kelly, Daniel Corkery, Liam O’Flaherty, Darrell Figgis, Brinsley MacNamara, Peadar O’Donnell, Elizabeth Bowen, and, of course, Joyce and Beckett. This motif has always appealed to Shepard’s imaginative instincts. O’Connor theorized that truly engaging fiction radiates a “glowing center of action,” an organic nerve center from which a work’s mimetic energy pulsates, a point which Shepard embraces.17 The problem afflicting Henry Conran and Henry Moss is that the “glowing center of action” long ago absented itself from their very existences. This central problem underpins the play’s essential theatricality. Henry Moss, like Henry Conran before him, finds himself suspended in some nether-world between the living and the dead. This in-betweenness produces an ongoing predicament in which Henry Moss is, in poststructuralist terms, “always already” dead. Like his Irish predecessor, Moss feels as if he is “stone dead.” Henry Moss experiences an ongoing cosmic torture, feeling dead to the world though he cannot lapse into death itself.
Shepard spotlights the point during a tragicomedic scene in which Henry implores Taxi to gaze “past the outer covering” of his eyes in a search for some spark, ember, or “glowing center of action.” Although a browbeaten Taxi claims his eyes look fine, their repartee suggests otherwise:
They’re dead eyes! Any horse’s ass can see they’re dead! Don’t lie to me, moonface! [. . .] So – So you think there just might be a little spark inside there, huh? (pointing to his eyes) A little ember glowing? [. . . .] But you think there might be just a little bit of a glimmer? You saw something in there that led you to believe there was some – potential? Some – hope?
The answers remain open to question. Henry, immobilized because of his ghost-status, needs a substitute speaker to take up the question of his essence. Shepard’s script takes the audience to the nerve center of the play, for Henry must raise, as he says, “the question of my being! My aliveness! My actuality in this world! Whether or not I’m dead or not! [. . .]You can argue my case for me. I’ve got no one else.” Not surprisingly, Taxi finds himself accompanying Henry and Conchalla on their suddenly announced trout-fishing excursion. Shepard, however, is not merely dramatizing Henry’s quest to discover if he is “to be” or “not to be.” For the play quickly deepens as Shepard interrogates the highly contested site between the real and the imaginary.
Shepard’s conflating of the real with the imaginary assumes particular resonance through the subtle use of the family photographs throughout the play. They function, in a minor key, like the films in True West: through the ostensibly minor stage props of photographs, The Late Henry Moss explores a number of epistemological questions about the ways in which the individual apprehends, distorts, and then internalizes that distorted image of the real to such an extent that the distortion – an abstracted replication of actual experience – displaces reality itself. The photographs are connections to the past, tangible objects, however inadequate or illegitimate they might be. If, as Susan Sontag claims, “the camera’s twin capacities” enable the photograph to “subjectivize reality and to objectify it,”18 the pictures Ray and Earl gaze upon become outer manifestations of the inner distortions of the eye that perceives them. The family pictures that Ray gives away to a stranger are, for him, sentimental reprints of the original imprint. For Earl, however, “There were photographs in there going back to the turn of the century! . . . Those photographs are irreplaceable.”
Even here, though, Shepard subverts the value of such objects, for the photographs are of a prehistory, shots of a young Henry Moss “standing in a wheat field,” clueless about “what’s in store for him.” Ray senses that the photographs are substitutes for a current reality, a recalling and framing of a time past. Ray, Earl, and Henry try “to picture” (a term each man repeats during the three-hour play) earlier events but remain frustrated throughout because they only encounter various images, accounts, snapshots, as it were, not real life moments. This explains why, for Ray, photography and heredity interlink themselves through their potential falsification of outer experience. And it’s the falsification, not the image per se in the photo, that has been passed down from generation to generation, that reduces the American family to “a pack of liars.” For the Moss family as for the American family, Shepard implies, the photographs collapse into oversimplifications of past events precisely because the camera eye was never privy to the beatings and alcoholic destruction of the Moss home. An even greater danger appears if the perceiving eye of each new generation examining the photographs inevitably confers upon them the impression of objectivity, reliability, and, indeed, reality itself. Then they become part of the family’s folklore, its legitimized history. Thus the photographs in The Late Henry Moss (which, ironically, the audience never sees; we only see characters seeing other photographed figures) become nothing less than the true story, an authentic metanarrative of the family legacy.
Hence photographs, for Ray, remain suspect. They are co-conspirators and co-authors of frozen moments that are inadequate re-presentations, mere traces, of reality. This also explains why Ray berates a total stranger. After Taxi relates (in all sincerity as far as the audience can tell) that Comanche Indians killed his great-great-grandmother, Ray menacingly approaches, saying:
Sounds like a story to me [. . .] Thing about that kind of story, Taxi-man, is that the very first fabricator – the original liar who started this little rumor about your slaughtered Great Great Grandma – he’s dead and gone now, right? Vanished from this earth! All the ones who knew him are dead and gone. All that’s left is a cracked tin-type, maybe; a gnarly lock of bloody hair, some fingernail clippings in a leather pouch. So there’s really no way to verify this little story of yours, is there? This little history. No way to know if there’s even the slightest germ of truth to it. It’s just something you’ve grown to believe in. Something you’ve become convinced of because it . . . gives you a sense of belonging, somewhere in time. A pathetic, sad little sense of belonging – out here in the black, black open-ended plains.
(Pause. Ray stops very close to Taxi’s face, chewing on the pepper.)
TAXI You’re not calling me a liar are you?
RAY Your whole family’s a pack of liars. They were born liars. They couldn’t help themselves. That’s why it’s important to try to get at the heart of things, don’t you think? Somebody, somewhere along the line, has to try to get at the heart of things.
Throughout the drama, metaphoric experience vies with actual experience for a purchase on human memory and consciousness. Ray distrusts the family album enough to give it, and Henry’s “swap meet” (rather than genuine quality) ratchet wrench, to Taxi. Perhaps Ray thinks he can transfer his family’s blighted past to someone else’s. Maybe Taxi can refurbish falsehoods about heritage, substituting the Moss photographs for his own family’s and encoding and developing them in new prints, new fictions: “Well, he can always make up some kind of story about them . . . He can tell people they’re pictures of his family. His ancestors . . . Maybe he’s got no family. Maybe he needs to make one up.”
Shepard finished much of The Late Henry Moss by the premiere of Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), yet another film version of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Shepard plays King Hamlet in the film. The Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet may or may not gain release from purgatory; but the Ghost in The Late Henry Moss gains release, though in accord with Shepard’s postmodernist cosmology, his spirit will rise to heaven only after Conchalla, who appears as a memento mori, pours booze into his mouth, eases Henry to his death, and speaks the play’s closing lines, “Henry is going to bed now. Henry is going to heaven.” During his transfigurations from Living Man to Ghost Man to Dead Man, Henry Moss achieves transcendence of sorts. In his epiphanic moment, Henry Moss realizes that he always has been the source of his exile, the patriarch responsible for this family’s collective state of shock, and the one who died a quarter of a century ago. His lines represent some of the strongest of the entire script:
HENRY (on his knees) I remember – The day I died – she was on the floor.
CONCHALLA (stroking Henry’s head) Now, he sees.
HENRY I remember the floor – was yellow – and – her blood – was smeared across it like – orange butterflies. She was surrounded – by butterflies and – I thought I’d killed her – but it was me. It was me I killed [. . .] She kept – peering out at me through her swollen eyes. She just stayed there – under the sink. Silent. Balled up like an animal. Nothing moving but her eyes. She must have seen me. She must have seen me – dying – right there. She knew! I ran out into the yard and I remember – I remember feeling – this – death. Cut off. Everything – far away. Birds. Trees. Sky. Everything. Removed! Removed from me! I ran. I ran to the car and I drove. I drove for days with the windows wide open. The wind blowing across my eyes. I couldn’t stop. I had no map. No destination. I just drove. Drove until the money ran out [. . .] That’s how I got here, wasn’t it? I just – ran out. Ran out of gas.
These are Henry Moss’s last words, heartbreakingly bellowed by Gammon. Shepard of course ironizes those last lines: Henry just – and the pause is telling – “ran out” of much more than fuel for his car, for this is a man who “ran out” of his marriage, relationship, home, fatherhood, and any meaningful connection with a larger community. Henry lies near death, a blanket shrouding him. Shepard’s stage directions here are significant, for Henry’s body is covered in “a yellow, orange, and red Mexican blanket,” colors precisely matching those used to describe his wife lying on the kitchen floor, blood pouring from her beaten body.
At last Henry Moss understands his source of spectral terror, discovers its etiology. The power to terrorize can no longer be blotted from the landscape because such power has actually been carried into the landscape by his limited imagination in the first place. Shepard so successfully internalizes the terror – through inner webbings of heredity, legacy, and legitimacy – that the outer tensions of the public disappear into the inner anxieties of Henry. His fears become the conditions and consequences of his psychic state of mind. For Henry, as for his sons, the stimulus for terror ultimately comes from within. Thus there can be, in the lives they lead, no real survivors, no remissions of the terrible, and little chance to escape their fates. More often than not, it seems, the Mosses have been their own executioners. Self-afflicted and self-victims, Shepard dooms them to enact their downward journey, drifting further and further into voluble wonderment at themselves. The play, for Henry, has been a self-murder mystery.
In the Moss family’s pursuit of the truth, the initial investigative question – what happened to father? – shifts to include a broader range of possibilities – what happened to father, mother, and children? What happened to other families suffering similar fates? What happened to communal decency? Thus Ray involves himself in much more than an obligatory plane trip to take care of funeral arrangements. When he decides to move into his father’s home, he embarks on a symbolic homecoming of sorts. The return is not featured as extensively as the homecoming was in Buried Child, and Shepard elects not to develop this family as fully as the ones in Curse of the Starving Class and True West. But when Earl presses, “just go back home, Ray. Back where you came from,” Ray can only respond, “Where was that? I’ve been trying to figure that one out . . . Where I came from.” Ray fills the refrigerator, that appliance which is symbolic in many Shepard plays, with food and Coca-Cola (which in America was for a time advertised as the “Real Thing”). He feels, he says, a “connection.” While it would be wishful thinking to suggest that Ray’s nourishment will replace Esteban’s Menudo, the soup that cures hangovers in the play, his gesture is his way of moving closer to the truth about the Moss birthright.
The Late Henry Moss, then, concerns more than two brothers and a father engaged in a fateful and fatal reunion. This is a play in which the errant Mosses debate notions of honor, duty, and responsibility, ideas for years banished to the margins of their impoverished social world as they struggled with various “tokens of guilt.” Like those in Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, and A Lie of the Mind, the family members of The Late Henry Moss experience the pressures of a dimly perceived scourge. The buried truths of the past, repressed through years of denial and subterfuge, are sources of disconnection in the family. No wonder the father claims that he does not even recognize one of his sons. Love is absent in The Late Henry Moss. Isolation is the norm. Denial becomes both a source of comfort and anguish. A willed ignorance stabilizes this family. The curse must be passed on, especially as seen in Earl, who has in effect become his father (much as when Nolte, playing the son of an alcoholic, became, like his father, a drunken misanthrope in the film Affliction [1999]).
Shepard refuses to construct a neat ending to The Late Henry Moss. Despite the father’s and sons’ intentions, they do not atone for their sins. There is no expiation, and the past legacies remain vibrant forces in a family long ago drained of its vibrancy. Henry, Earl, and Ray can only ponder the inevitability of their biological and spiritual destiny. Their father was, after all, Henry Jamison Moss, Jr. (my emphasis). They remain, at best, vaguely aware that a replicating process ensures that the heritage propagated by their grandfather to their father has been transferred to the sons through an ungovernable Darwinianism. The threat to future generations, Shepard implies, is a given. It seems unlikely, in light of the ending Shepard has scripted, that they will ever come to terms with their identities. No wonder Shepard has commented, “To me, one of the strangest and most terrifying things about being human is the need to come up with an identity. It has always bewildered me, and I can say that even now it’s still mostly unresolved . . . ‘Who am I?’ As hackneyed and simplistic as the question might sound to us of the dot-com e-mail computer age, it may still remain the most important one we can ever ask.”19
Still, there is, in the end, something oddly consoling about Henry Moss’s coming to terms with his plight – and his death – as a son covers him with the Mexican blanket while the lights and music fade. Now he can leave a home Shepard described as “a jail cell.” The play has been, for a baffled Henry Moss, a valediction encouraging mourning. It is a play filled, as Patti Smith once reflected, with “all those special dialogues of the heart.”20 To allude to the epigraph Shepard invokes, Henry learns that since living, for him, has been a crime, “ . . .’tis no crime to be dead.” In Shepard’s latest incarnation of the depleted American family, the “real” finds its authenticity in death. Henry soon dies after Conchalla, in a paradoxically cajoling and comforting gesture, pours liquor down his throat. Henry slips into the familiar stupor that has been his life. But he also slips, finally and incontrovertibly Shepard implies, to another and possibly more hospitable world.
2 Ibid., 79.
3 Sam Shepard, Fool for Love, in Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 20.
4 Sam Shepard, Seduced, in Fool for Love and Other Plays, 276.
5 Sam Shepard, The Holy Ghostly, in The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 182. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
6 Edward Guthmann, “Shepard Talks a Bit about His Latest,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5 November 2000, 2.
7 Sam Shepard, The Late Henry Moss, manuscript draft of the play. All further references are to this manually typed version Shepard gave to me before the play went into rehearsal. I base my speculative essay, then, on this reading version and on seeing the world premiere of the play in San Francisco. Because quotations come from a manuscript draft, I have not furnished page numbers after each citation. As this volume was in its final production, plans were underway for the Signature Theatre Company in New York City to launch its 2001–2 season with The Late Henry Moss, under the direction of Joseph Chaikin.
8 John Lahr, “Giving Up the Ghost,” The New Yorker, 4 December 2000, 108.
9 See Issacharoff and Jones’s edited collection, Performing Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).
10 Christopher Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 183–84.
11 Frank O’Connor, Collected Stories (New York: Knopf, 1981), 13.
12 Ibid., 18.
13 Ibid., 19.
14 Sam Shepard, Cruising Paradise: Tales (New York: Knopf, 1996), 142.
15 Ibid., 145.
16 O’Connor, Collected Stories, 16–17.
17 Quoted from Richard Ellmann, “Introduction,” O’Connor, Collected Stories, VII; see also Roudané, “Shepard on Shepard,” chapter 3, 78–79.
18 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978), 178.
19 Sam Shepard, “Foreword,” in Mary Motley Kalergis, Seen and Heard: Teenagers Talk about Their Lives (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1998), 6–7.
20 Patti Smith, “Sam Shepard: 9 Random Years [7 + 2],” in Sam Shepard, Angel City, Curse of the Starving Class, and Other Plays (New York: Urizen Books, 1980), 244.