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THIS SO-CALLED DISASTER

The eponymous catastrophe of This So-Called Disaster, Michael Almereyda’s documentary about Sam Shepard’s world-premiere staging of his play The Late Henry Moss, is neither the play nor the production — the latter a 2000 San Francisco must-see that starred Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, and Cheech Marin, with T-Bone Burnett on guitar. The title is taken from a letter written by the playwright’s alcoholic father assuring him that the calamity of his parents’ marriage, their violent home life, had nothing to do with him. Had the younger Shepard accepted that expiation, we’d be looking at a lesser body of work.

Almereyda’s film zigzags among three weeks of gritty rehearsal (with an explosive Nolte typically wearing pajama pants), interviews with the collaborators, and glimpses of the play, in which two volatile siblings grapple in the shadow of their father’s corpse. It’s always interesting to see art flounder into being and to watch movie stars with a real bone to chew. And there are some funny bits that are also revelatory, as when Shepard, rousing himself to articulation, explains Brechtian acting to Harrelson. But This So-Called Disaster is most valuable for the glimpse it provides of an unusually candid Shepard. For once, the snaggle-toothed cowboy playwright turned movie star cops to the close connections between his work and an early life lived wedged between American myth and hardscrabble family and dominated by a ferocious, broken-down dad — like Henry Moss dead and alive at the same time. (89 minutes)

BY CAROLYN CLAY

Issue Date: June 18 - 24, 2004
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