"The Late Henry Moss" is fueled by Shepard's curt, charged dialogue and a boisterous, comic-relief performance by Harrelson as a bewildered taxi driver with clues to the patriarch Henry Moss' final days on a fishing trip. As Moss himself, who appears through flashbacks, veteran stage and movie actor James Gammon literally is the damaged alcoholic looking into the spiritual emptiness of his guttersnipe life. "I thought I'd killed her," he finally confesses of beating his wife. "But it was me I killed!"

In many ways, "The Late Henry Moss" reprises themes, characters and stage devices that have long defined Shepard's writing. But despite the critics who pounced on the parallels to bolster their dim opinions that Shepard was treading old ground, the play represents a beautiful, elegiac summary of the themes that have tortured Shepard to create one of the most prolific and original careers in the American theater.

"The Late Henry Moss" is not Shepard's best play. Penn either misinterpreted the role of Ray Moss, badly underplaying his simmering resentment, or Shepard needs to sharpen Ray's portrait as a control freak on the edge. The character never catches fire and so when he does erupt in anger the effect is a dud.

But no matter. Nolte's and Gammon's final showdown is spectacular. It begins as a squonking duet of guilt and regret and takes flight on a simple melody of forgiveness. The smoky, gravelly timbre of Gammon's and Nolte's voices is so eerily similar that during their emotional sparring they seem to change sides, to transpose into one another. The son becomes the father and in the process discovers his own heart.

After the anger and recrimination between them ebbs, Gammon collapses in bed. With what seems like his own last breath, an exhausted Nolte asks his father if he wants something, "a blanket, maybe?" It's heartbreaking. Earlier, Gammon had posed, "Peaceful, that would be something, wouldn't it?" But a son's peacefulness is what we take away from the theater, a gift from Shepard that has been a very long time in coming.

The New Yorker's John Lahr, who has written about Shepard for more than two decades, was alone among critics in pointing out that Shepard's fictionalized father made his first appearance in 1969 in "The Holy Ghostly," when he was called Stanley Moss. Lahr doesn't state as much, but "The Holy Ghostly" and "The Late Henry Moss" serve as perfect bookends of Shepard's plays. In between lies the evolution of the playwright's art, a search through pain and illusion, memory and history, for transcendence and peace.

"The Holy Ghostly's" plot can be summarized as: "Father? Yes, son? I want to kill you." With its loopy songs and syncopated language, mad witches and mean motherfucker sons, it's wonderfully representative of Shepard's early plays, the huge batch of one-acts that seemed to pour out of him before he settled into the more complex and reflective "Buried Child" in 1978.

Living in a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side and bussing tables at the Village Gate, Shepard at 26 years old was living and writing close to the bone. He didn't care if his work was perceived as autobiography. From the mouth of the horn-mad son to the father, who cries out that he's dead inside, these were the words that the young writer just had to say in "The Holy Ghostly":

For eighteen years I was your slave. I worked for you hand and foot. Shearing the sheep. Irrigating the trees, listening to your bullshit about "improve your mind, you'll never get ahead, learn how to lose, hard work and guts and never say die" and now I suppose you want me to bring you back to life. You pathetic creep. Hire yourself a professional mourner, Jim. I'm splitting.

Before he does, though, he pulls out a gun and shoots his father in the stomach.

Shepard these days advises fans not to get too excited about his early plays. Says he in "Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself," a fine video documentary that made the PBS rounds in 1998: "They were chants, they were incantations, they were spells, or whatever you want to call them. You get on 'em and you go. To say they were well-thought out, they weren't. They were a pulse."

And the erratic heartbeat in most of them was pumped by Shepard looking back in anger at his 1950s childhood on a small avocado ranch in Duarte, Calif., a town outside of Pasadena that was no more than a suburban remnant, thrown up with leftover building materials that developers had little use for. Duarte "was a weird accumulation of things, a strange kind of melting pot -- Spanish, Okie, black, Midwestern elements all jumbled together. People on the move who couldn't move anymore, who wound up in trailer parks," Shepard told Rolling Stone's Jonathon Cott in 1986.

Shepard's parents had always been on the move. His father was raised on an Illinois farm and later joined the Army Air Corps. Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers IV in Fort Sheridan, Ill., in 1943. Following the birth of his two younger sisters, the family moved to South Dakota, Utah, Florida, Guam and South Pasadena before settling in Duarte. Shepard's mother was a teacher and his father held a series of odd jobs while he attended night school to also be a teacher.

"My father had a real short fuse," Shepard told biographer Don Shewey. "He had a really tough life -- had to support his mother and brothers at a very young age when his dad's farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. It was past frustration; it was anger."

More often than not, Shepard was the brunt of that anger. So when he read about a small traveling theater coming through Duarte, Shepard, who had become smitten with acting in high school, and had scratched out poems about despair in his dead-end town, signed on for the ride. Performing Thornton Wilder plays in New England churches? Sure, why not? When the Bishop's Company Repertory Players landed in New York, Shepard got off the bus.

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