Tilden: We had a baby. He did. Dodge did. Could pick it up with one hand. Put it in the other. Little baby. Dodge killed it....

Dodge: Tilden? You leave that girl alone!

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Tilden: Never told Halie. Never told anybody. Just drowned it.

Dodge: Tilden!

Tilden: Nobody could find it. Just disappeared. Cops looked for it. Neighbors. Nobody could find it.

Dodge: Tilden, what're you telling her! Tilden!

Tilden: Everybody just gave up. Just stopped looking. Everybody had a different answer. Kidnap. Murder. Accident. Some kind of accident.

Dodge: Tilden you shut up! You shut up about it!

Tilden: Little tiny baby just disappeared. It's not hard. It's so small. Almost invisible.

In 1983, Shepard could admire the critical and popular success of his family plays. John Malkovich and Gary Sinise had mounted a daring production of "True West" that he truly loved. His romantic affair with Lange was deepening, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in "The Right Stuff." At the same time, from the set of "Country," which he was filming with Lange in Iowa, he wrote Chaikin a letter: "Something's been coming to me lately about this whole question of being lost. It only makes sense to me in relation to an idea of one's identity being shattered under severe personal circumstances -- in a state of crisis where everything that I've previously identified with in myself suddenly falls away."

When he lived in London, Shepard became enamored with the writings of Russian spiritual master G.I. Gurdjieff. So his sharp sense of being lost, of having his identity shattered, no doubt represented to him a kind of pure state of inner being. It is an empty place, a chaotic and frightening one, but it is a place free of illusion, a place where everything a public artist, a celebrity, has been told he is doesn't hold. The one predominant and enduring theme in Shepard's work is the agonizing struggle to fill that empty space with love.

Listen to him in his story, "You I Have No Distance From": "I can't remember what it was like before I met you. Was I always like this? I remember myself lost ... But you I have no distance from. Every move you make feels like I'm traveling in your skin."

The evolution of Shepard's personal life is shown in technicolor in the tract homes and desert huts of his plays. In the absence of love and connection, the booze flows; relationships come crashing down. The explosive "Fool for Love," in which lovers and half-siblings May and Eddie rage at each other in jealousy -- "You know we're connected May. We'll always be connected" -- can easily be seen as the end of Shepard's marriage. Indeed, that year (1983), he permanently left O-Lan to move in with Lange. His divorce was final in 1984.

Given the tempestuous turns his characters have taken under endless emotional storms, it's no wonder he has remained a relatively private man. The search for love and transcendence is a fragile business in the public world of movies and popular theater. Someone always wants to tell you where to go. The allure of Shepard's elusive nature is that he has never stopped searching alone.

And we can only admire his devotion. He tells me he acts in movies only to support his writing. "No way," I say. "You're Sam Shepard." Says he: "You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by." He does at times enjoy sinking into a role, but, just the same, he would rather be on his ranch sinking fence posts, playing with his kids or writing in his small room next to the barn.

Like his characters in "The Late Henry Moss," Shepard is "not one to live in the past." He has not resolved the anguish that fathers and sons heap upon themselves, but he has peeled away a great deal of the despair, exposing an "ember of hope." Clearly, Shepard has traveled a long way from blasting his fictional father with a revolver to comforting him quietly with a blanket.

But at 57, the angular, elusive cowboy is not going soft on us. He is still riding alone across a mesa, it's just that now he believes that out there, somewhere, is a deep, enduring peace. In his great 1985 play "A Lie of the Mind," he seemed to doubt he would ever find it. But now, it appears, the winds of change have worked their wonders. "You know, those winds that wipe everything clean and leave the sky without a cloud. Pure blue. Pure, pure blue."

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