Penn and Nolte to star in "Henry Moss" Thursday, November 23, 2000/ From Jam! Sean Penn and Nick Nolte are taking the stage and creating a theatre ticket buying frenzy. The two Hollywood stars are the lead characters in Sam Shepard's new play, "The Late Henry Moss," Entertainment Weekly reports. The production is being staged in San Francisco and opened last Tuesday in a 750 seat theatre. In addition to Penn and Nolte, the play also boasts stars Woody Harrelson and Cheech Marin who are said to provide the show's comic relief. The play is about two fiery brothers who are dealing with the death of their difficult father, Henry Moss, and are overwhelmed with anger and alcohol. The plot is advanced by Penn's character's attempt to discover the circumstances surrounding his father's death. He becomes frustrated which leads to problems with his older brother (Nolte) whom Penn thinks knows more about the death then he's revealing. Harrelson wins laughs as a cab driver in the second act who finds himself being psychologically tortured by Penn and his late father while Marin's character finds himself in the same sort of situation. "The Late Henry Moss" is understandably proving to be the hot ticket. When tickets went on sale last summer, they were bought up in a matter of minutes and some San Francisco residents paid hundreds for a subscription series package to the theatre's season in order to see "Moss". Although the play hasn't won much attention from higher ups in New York and L.A. yet, word is beginning to spread as twenty rush seats go on sale ever day to hopefuls who stand in line and enter a ticket lottery. The play closes on December 17 and is expected to make its way to Broadway next year although Penn, Nolte, Harrelson and Marin probably won't migrate with it. Sam Shepard's past works include "Buried Child" which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979.
Penn Central November 22, 2000/ By Chris Willman from EW Daily Sean Penn and Nick Nolte take to the stage. A new Sam Shepard play attracts major Hollywood talent -- and a ticket buying frenzyThe San Francisco Chronicle called this local theatrical production ''the hottest ticket in America.'' Under almost any other circumstances, such a comment would be dismissed as hometown hyperbole. But that may actually be an understatement when it comes to the veeeeery sold out five week run of Sam Shepard's new play. ''The Late Henry Moss'' premiered last Tuesday at the 750 seat Theatre on the Square with a we must be dreaming cast of actors rarely or never seen onstage. Sean Penn and Nick Nolte play a pair of highly volatile, battlin' brothers, while Woody Harrelson and Cheech Marin provide the comic relief. Even the guy noodling on the guitar in the corner, T-Bone Burnett, is something of a legend. When tickets for ''Henry Moss'' went on sale last summer, they were gone almost instantly, mostly to San Franciscans who spent hundreds of dollars on an entire subscription series just to get a ''Moss'' ducat. At this point, Ralph Nader stands a better chance of being declared president than a normal Joe does of scoring a seat, and even high powered Hollywood types may have to take out second mortgages on their souls to get in. Nolte, who hasn't done a stage play in 30 years, and Penn, whose last theater gig came in 1988, portray the surviving sons of the recently deceased title character -- they're brothers consumed by rage and alcohol, respectively, from growing up under a particularly ill tempered father. As with ''Buried Child,'' or any number of other Shepard dramas, there are the familiar hallmarks: grotesquely dysfunctional families harboring big secrets, bumping up against unsuspecting bumpkins. Call it ''Unburied Dad'': Henry Moss' shrouded corpse lies onstage for the first half; then this monster of a father comes alive in increasingly lengthy flashbacks. The actor playing him, James Gammon, earned a spontaneous burst of applause from the premiere audience after Moss' first major vein popping tirade. The plot, such as it is, centers on Penn's attempts to uncover the circumstances of his less than beloved pop's death. His increasing frustration leads to near fisticuffs with smoking and boozing older bro Nolte, whom Penn suspects -- rightly, of course -- of knowing more than he lets on. The second act is comic, bordering on slapstick, with Harrelson drawing big laughs as a slacker cab driver who comes to be psychologically terrorized by both Penn and, in flashback, Gammon. Poor Marin gets similarly menaced and then cuckolded. But the psychodrama gets less comedic and more harrowingly metaphysical toward the end of the three hour three acter (which reportedly ran 20 minutes longer in previews). ''Moss'' has so far gathered almost no publicity in media centers like New York and L.A. Most of the celebs in attendance on Tuesday had some connection to the production (like Penn's wife, Robin Wright Penn, and Marin's ''Nash Bridges'' costar, Don Johnson), or the area (Bay based director Philip Kaufman brought along his ''Quills'' star Geoffrey Rush). Expect that to change quickly as word of mouth spreads south and east. But even high powered agents and managers may have to vie for tickets the same way as the general public: Twenty extra rush seats go on sale every day to prospective patrons who stand in line in Union Square to be entered in a lottery. Urgency is understandable: Though the play, which closes Dec. 17, is said to be headed for Broadway next year, it won't be with this potent all star cast. Penn, in particular, has been amusingly cast to type; Nolte, apologizing to other characters for his brother's borderline violent behavior, describes him as someone who ''flies off the handle.'' Those ominous signs outside the auditorium, warning patrons that anyone caught with a camera will be ejected, and any film ''confiscated and destroyed,'' should seem more ominous than usual: Anyone dumb enough to think about sneaking in an Instamatic will do well to remember that ejection and destruction are the sort of duties that cameraphobic Penn has, in the past, not delegated to mere ushers.
Shepard! Penn! Harrelson! Nolte! Nov. 21, 2000/ By Joe Mader, from Salon Our most famous chronicler of the desert of the male psyche returns to San Francisco with a new play and an all-star cast. In the 1970s and '80s, Sam Shepard was an artist-in-residence at San Francisco's Magic Theatre, premiering many of his most famous works there. The Magic is now again host to a Shepard world premiere, "The Late Henry Moss." Two factors have propelled the production into a huge media event: The author himself directs, and he has assembled an amazingly high-wattage cast. Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson and Cheech Marin headline, veteran character actor James Gammon takes on the title role and Sheila Tousey plays a lusty Indian woman with mysterious powers. The Magic moved the show from its small home stage to the 740-seat Theatre on the Square, near San Francisco's Union Square. Still, the five-week run is already sold out. (A small number of same-day rush tickets are still available for each performance.) In one sense, "The Late Henry Moss" is a culmination of Shepard's playwriting, both a summing up of and an expansion of the themes and issues he has explored throughout his career. There are the warring siblings of "True West," the hidden family secrets and wounds of "Buried Child," the symbolism of "A Lie of the Mind" and the themes of the frontier's end, the damage fathers do to sons and all the macho-mythic desperation and attempted poeticism that exist in so many of his works. But Shepard doesn't enlarge these themes; he isn't exploring anything new, original or insightful. It's as if a college student completed an assignment to write in the style of the playwright. Shepard's halfheartedly cribbing from himself, and it makes for a very long evening. The show opens with a quiet, funny malevolence. After a preliminary tango across the stage by Gammon and Tousey, we see Earl Moss (Nolte) sitting at a table in a secluded, rural New Mexico house, drinking bourbon and smoking, while his younger brother, Ray (Penn), stands with his back to the audience, swinging a socket wrench, its clicking ratchet the only noise. He's gazing at a corpse wrapped in a sheet on the upstage bed -- the pair's father, Henry. The brothers haven't seen each other in many years: Earl fled the family long ago after a drunken rampage in which Henry terrorized and battered his wife and broke out the windows of their home. But there's something fishy in Earl's description of Henry's death. He tells Ray that Henry's neighbor, Esteban (Marin), had called him when Henry left the house in a taxicab and didn't come back for a while. Earl flew in to discover Henry already dead. Esteban, later making his usual delivery of soup for Henry, unaware that he has died, supports Earl's story about the phone call, though it's clear he's covering up something for Earl. Esteban explains that Henry, flush and drunk in the aftermath of receiving a government check, called a taxi to take him and Conchala (Tousey) -- a woman with whom he occasionally caroused and slept -- on a fishing trip. Ray subsequently interviews the cabdriver (Harrelson), who relates a somewhat different narrative. There are several extended flashback sequences that get us to the "truth" of the matter. We watch Earl grapple with his guilt over cowardly abandoning his mother and brother while Ray wrestles with his anger and sorrow. There are stretches of ironic, banal dialogue. (Ray to the cabdriver: "You're nothin'. Just like me." Henry to Earl: "You know me, Earl -- I was never one to live in the past.") These are occasionally interrupted by desert heartland poetry. (Earl to Ray: "You jump all over him like a cold sweat." Earl to Esteban: "I am nothing like the old man: We're as different as chalk and cheese.") Plus, there's Conchala, Shepard's woman-myth character. In one flashback, we find out that when she and Henry first met, in the jail drunk tank, she pronounced Henry dead: "Dead for 20 years, a dead man living in a dead house." (Shepard's telling us that women define men, even holding the power of life and death over them.) Henry and Conchala return from the fishing trip with one tiny, 4-inch catch. Conchala strips down to a slip, takes a bath (still partially clothed) and puts the fish between her legs. It comes back to life; she puts it in her mouth, and swallows it whole.
