"Oh, pleased to meet you," he says in his dulcet, country-and-western drawl, remembering, I think, our previous conversation. At the time, he was staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, taking a break from playing a small role in a John Travolta spy movie called "Swordfish."

Up close, Shepard is tall, gaunt as an aging rancher and still as classically handsome as the moment he appeared on-screen as the laconic, fatally ill wheat farmer in "Days of Heaven." His hair is thinner now, more of his forehead is revealed, and his sharp nose and high, Native American-like cheekbones, along with the lines in his weatherworn face, deepen the wisdom of his sad blue eyes.

As friendly and accommodating as Shepard seems, though, his conversational manner is clearly schooled by his spiritual mentor, Samuel Beckett. Yes, he agrees, the celebrity thing does feel a little off the charts tonight. But he doesn't mind it for a while. "I think Armani put up a lot of money for the party," he says. Don't blame him, though, for jump-starting the celebrity machine to gain attention for his new play. "I didn't set out to cast movie stars," he says. "It just happens that every single one of them is a dynamite actor. The fact that they're movie stars is something else."

"The Late Henry Moss" hasn't opened yet. So I tell Shepard from what I've read about its plot -- two rival brothers trying to piece together the details of their alcoholic father's death in the New Mexico desert -- that it sounds like a dramatization of one of the stories from his collection, "Cruising Paradise." In that story, set in New Mexico, the author's father staggers out of a bar into the middle of a road and is killed by a car. Later, the author finds, among his late father's belongings, a pile of unmailed letters, one of which is addressed to him. It concludes: "See you in my dreams."

"Did that really happen?" I ask. "It did, yeah," Shepard responds. The 1989 story was indeed a blueprint for "The Late Henry Moss," which was inspired by his father's death in 1984. "It took me five years to even consider writing about it," he says. "Finally, I came to the point where I thought that if I don't write about it, some aspect of it may be lost."

Since the stories in "Cruising Paradise" aren't labeled as autobiographical, but read as if they're lifted out his journal, I can't help asking Shepard about the hilarious "Spencer Tracy Is Not Dead." The most underrated quality of Shepard's writing is that it is really, truly funny. So was he really driven to a movie shoot in Mexico in a metallic blue limo by a German named Gunther, who was wearing a tuxedo, cummerbund and fluffy shirt? Did they really get pulled over for speeding in El Paso and have the car stripped by the drug police?

Shepard smiles, crow's feet spreading across his temples. "Yeah. They let the air out of all the tires so we couldn't go anywhere. Popped the hubcaps. Went through all of our luggage. Yeah, that's true." The shoot was for the movie "Voyager," based on the novel "Homo Faber" by Max Frisch. "Have you read it?" asks Shepard. "I think Frisch is one of the best modern writers." In fact, I have. But before I say anything, I see Shepard is looking across the patio. "Well, I gotta go meet Sean," he says. "Nice talkin' to you."

As the party wears on, Shepard remains insulated by friends, eating dinner with Philip Kaufman, who directed him in "The Right Stuff," and talking with musician T-Bone Burnett, whom Shepard has known since 1976, when they were both members of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue. "He's the only one on the tour I'm not sure has relative control over his violent dark side," Shepard would write about Burnett. "He's not scary, he's just crazy."

Toward the end of the night, Shepard and the lanky Burnett join the dinner jazz band, the Randy Scott Trio. A drummer since he was a wayward California teenager, Shepard gets behind the kit; Burnett commandeers a microphone and they knock out a version of the novelty country hit "Long Tall Texan." As the remaining partygoers head out the door for home, Shepard bangs his way through Chuck Berry's rickety classic "Too Much Monkey Business."

"I was never one to live in the past" is the first and last line of "The Late Henry Moss." In between, Shepard has crafted his most moving, certainly most tender attempt to resolve a son's agony over his abusive, alcoholic father's death.

The play actually caroms between two brothers who, contrary to their opening and closing line, live trapped in the past. One is pinched, nasty and repressed (Penn), the other sodden, pitiful and ultimately loving (Nolte). Their drive to piece together the arc and fall of their father's final bender is a desperate desire to spring themselves from the traumatic memories of him viciously beating their mother -- memories they blame for shaping the estranged courses of their own wanton lives.

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