16 - Sam Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss

Summary

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.” 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.” 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.