In a cramped 43-seat theater equipped with a malfunctioning sound system, Sam Shepard’s The Late Henry Moss beautifully and mournfully asks: what constitutes death—or life?
The production squashes any negative expectation one might harbor when entering the theater. The opening music consists of folk and classic rock, piles of wooden planks and rolls of linoleum lie under the risers on which the audience’s seats rest, and during preview performances, almost half of the seats in the house are “reserved for press.”
Despite all this, the play—a combination of thoughtful writing and soulful acting—is a masterpiece.
Set somewhere out in the desert, an hour’s drive from Albuquerque, N.M., the three-act tragi-comic drama, concerns the lives of two estranged brothers, their estranged father, a taxi-driver, a woman, and a kindly, Mexican neighbor: five worthless men and a goddess-like whore. It follows Henry’s death from alcoholism, the neuroses of the Moss brothers and the neighbor, and a woman, Conchalla, who sets the play in motion.
The force, honesty and simple cleverness of Shepherd’s script and the humanity of the acting is immediately noticeable, even in the comic moments. As the brothers talk, one says to the other: “I was in shock; I’m still in shock; I wasn’t expecting to be in shock, but I guess that’s the thing about shock.” They argue in circles, not searching for peace but aware of its absence.
In an interview with Newsday, Rod Sweitzer, who plays the younger brother Ray, said the material is its own reward: “as an actor, there’s nothing better than doing Shepard’s plays... It’s like Shakespeare in a way.”
The members of the White Horse Theater Company had seen the first production of The Late Henry Moss and dismissed it, only realizing later that the fault lay in the production, not the play. Now, the work has come into its own. It is a play made to linger in the memory. Even days later, it is impossible to forget the face of Conchalla as she hums a tune of alarming beauty and pours hard liquor down her dying lover’s gullet.
Most fascinating about both the acting and the writing is that, with the exception of the driver—who is developed no more than his relatively minor role requires—each character is revealed, sinew by sinew, until he is vital to the play as a whole.
Actress Sylvia Roldán Dohi, who plays the part of the too-young girlfriend, steals the show. Always the exception to the rule, Conchalla is not only the sole female character, but she is also the only character to demonstrate fierceness of will and steadfastness.
In contrast to Dohi’s portrayal of Conchalla, James Wetzel and Sweitzer, who play the brothers Ray and Earl, bring an element of emotional instability to Shepherd’s work. Ray’s anger in the play builds and abates like the tides, belying a thick undercurrent of weakness, self-pity, and inadequacy.
His imbalance, alongside Earl’s struggle between his newfound knowledge and surfacing tensions with his sibling, captivate the audience.
Like the cyclical journeys that each character travels, the language in the play follows a circular pattern of change. The changing of words and their meanings forms a sub-theme in The Late Henry Moss. The script seems to give the characters nervous ticks and mannerisms. For example, Earl Moss changes his words around each time he repeats a lie. He expresses similar meanings, but speaks with continually changing nuances.
Like Moss, the play as a whole delivers new information and emotions in each line of dialogue. Even as the characters run in circles, they evolve and change the old.
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