In the White Horse Theater Company’s production of Sam Shepard’s “The Late Henry Moss,” the past dominates the present. Sure, the play swims in autobiographical detail, with the playwright resolving a decades long obsession with his father, and the text itself revolves on remembrance. But it’s also a production haunted by the ghosts of its own premiere.

When “Henry Moss” first appeared in San Francisco, it did so with a starstudded dream cast. No matter how respectably the White Horse company does, it’s difficult not to imagine Sean Penn or Nick Nolte making the same speeches, throwing the same punches. It’s a play that needs monstrously large performances, and in the tiny confines of the Creative Place, only a midsize competence is on offer.

In a particularly dusty corner of New Mexico, brothers Ray Moss (Rod Sweitzer) and Earl (James Wetzel) bicker over their father’s recently dead body. Even laid out under a blanket, the abusive, elusive Henry (Bill Fairbairn) still dominates his boys’ lives. Both Earl and Ray seem perilously close to becoming him, with Earl displaying the atomic vulnerability and Ray spitting the venom. Henry’s last days, full of trips to the drunk tank and binges with witchy Indian women, conceal a secret that Ray seems intent on sussing out. Though Earl just wants the body to rest in some kind of peace, his twitchy younger brother drives the two of them into confrontation with each other, their father, and their past.

Not content to kill his father’s surrogate once, Sam Shepard kills him off a couple of times. In the long flashbacks that form the center of the play, Henry’s mysterious girlfriend Conchalla (Sylvia Roldan Dohi) diagnoses him as a man already dead. Having been a violent man his whole life, Henry’s anger turns slowly toward puzzlement. An idiot taxi driver (David Runco) presides over these scenes, relating them to Ray later as an unwilling participant. But even Taxi knows that Henry’s eyes had gone empty long before he dies.

This is good, bitter, whiskey-soaked stuff. The three men who form the Moss family all draw a nice bead on their weaknesses – Mr. Fairbairn does a great drunk, Mr. Wetzel does an even better drunk, and Mr. Sweitzer genuinely seems to enjoy stomping people. But Mr. Shepard leaves the weave of his story loose enough that other voices, and in this case other weaknesses, take hold.

The supporting cast largely misses the badass tenor of Mr. Shepard’s lines – and as the driver for the entire central section, Taxi really can’t steer. Again, a whisper of doubt: could Mr. Shepard have not noticed the sag of this section because Woody Harrelson (the original Taxi) charmed his way through it?

Director Cyndy A. Marion does fine work, using the grottiness of the stage to serve her purposes. Matt Downs McAdon’s set, especially under Debra Leigh Siegel’s lights, looks the part of a bachelor’s shack – one with rays of redemptive light pouring through the screen door. What Ms. Marion can’t control is the play’s pace. As is appropriate for a man’s farewell to his father, the acts stretch on languidly. There isn’t exactly a hurry to get the body out the door. This can get wearisome – particularly when a neighbor comes over for a chat, or Ray has to repeat a tantrum. But by the time Henry and his oldest boy come face to face for their final row, the play has found its power.

And it’s better “Late” than never.

Until February 6 (750 Eighth Avenue, between 46th and 47th Streets, 212-868-4444).