“If I can’t make something happen in under an hour and a half, it’s not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.”

When Sam Shepard directed the original 1985 Off Broadway production of his play “A Lie of the Mind,” about emotionally scarred young men and the damaged women in their lives, the production ran six hours at first. His latest play, “Ages of the Moon,” about two emotionally scarred men in their 60s, lasts about 80 minutes.

Time, in other words, has started slipping away in the Shepard canon, and the playwright could not be more at peace with that.

“I see my older plays as clunky relatives to the ones I’m doing now, to be honest, and I don’t have a great deal of interest in those older plays,” Mr. Shepard, who is also an actor, said . He added, “I’ve come to feel that if I can’t make something happen in under an hour and a half, it’s not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.”

Mr. Shepard, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979 for his play “Buried Child,” and is also the author of “True West” and more than 40 other plays, has always been a writer of economy, even when his men of few words take three acts to say them. Now, at 66, he has increasingly delved into punchy, pithy reflection with

“Ages of the Moon,” centered on a pair of friends, Ames and Byron, speaking about loss and regret from the vantage point of later life. “Ages” was part of a busy, ruminative winter for Mr. Shepard. “A Lie of the Mind” received its first revival Off Broadway . In January Alfred A. Knopf published a new collection of his short stories, poems and narrative sketches, “Day Out of Days .” And soon he will begin filming his latest movie, playing an older Butch Cassidy in “Blackthorn,” a kind of sequel set 15 years after the events of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” .

Having a new play and a major revival at the same time is an unusual experience for most writers, but it was a learning moment for Mr. Shepard: an opportunity to reflect on where he has been, and where he is now.

Mr. Shepard said he got sober in late January 2009, a few weeks after he was stopped in central Illinois and charged with speeding and driving under the influence of alcohol. He pleaded guilty a month later and was ordered to pay a fine, finish an alcohol treatment program and perform community service.

“I continue to struggle with it,” Mr. Shepard said. “You sometimes use the excuse, ‘I’m a writer, dammit, I can do anything I want,’ but that doesn’t work .”

Mr. Shepard, who has lived with the actress Jessica Lange since the 1980s, is already at work on a new play that is likely to be longer than the 80-minute “Ages,” but not by much.

“There is this aura that the three-act play is the important one, it’s the one that you do to win the Pulitzer,” he said. “Some part of you falls for that, and then after a while you don’t fall for that. What I’m after is something different than supplying people with the idea that I’m writing an important play. At this point, I’m writing for me.”


By PATRICK HEALY