‘Some dumb show — struggling with a dead horse, mumbling to yourself in front of a gaping hole you’ve spent a solid day digging, rambling on to imagined faceless souls.”

Sam Shepard can generally be counted on to mosey around a point, letting his symbolism-drenched dollops of Western-flavored Southern Gothic fill in the gaps as he goes. But when Hobart Strother blurts out this description of “Kicking a Dead Horse,” Mr. Shepard’s inert and occasionally inept exercise in Beckettian absurdism, he gets right to the point. And those faceless souls being treated to the dumb show — which Mr. Shepard has also directed, with the resourceful Irish actor Stephen Rea — are the paying customers.

Hobart is first seen in the aforementioned hole, which he has dug for the aforementioned horse. (Those two set elements, along with the excavated mounds of earth, are the only things to dot this picturesque stretch of nothingness, which has been designed invitingly by Brien Vahey and lit with parched precision by John Comiskey.) A former cowhand turned fine art dealer, Hobart has made a fortune buying up art from clueless owners and then flipping it back East for enormous profit. But pangs of remorse have led him to start flinging precious works out of his Park Avenue window — “Frederic Remingtons wrapped around the lampposts … Charlie Russells impaled on bus stop signs” — and it is decided that a trip back to the Badlands would be good for his soul.

Recapturing the unspoiled grandeur of the Wild West, however, is harder than he thought, owing largely to the fact that Hobart’s horse has keeled over and died after just one day. He decides the principled thing to do is to give the old nag a decent burial, which spurs him into a lengthy set of musings on the American ethos and “the quest for ‘Authenticity.'” (The capitalization is Mr. Shepard’s.)

As he ponders the doomed nature of this quest, Hobart soon succumbs to reductive enumerations of American wrongdoing and creaky paeans to long-departed Western icons: “Crazy Horse — a man of his people. Not many of them left.” These are frequently interrupted by arguments between Hobart and his snippy alter ego, as Mr. Rea makes like Gollum in “Lord of the Rings” with a split-personality dialogue. Mr. Rea helpfully tilts his head left and right to convey who’s talking during these chats, although the alter ego’s nasal, sing-songy cadence and his predilection for phrases such as “you’re one sick puppy” and “don’t make me puke” make it pretty clear.

The middle-of-nowhere banter is clearly meant to evoke Samuel Beckett, a parallel that is made explicit during a late — and, as staged by Mr. Shepard, rather inelegant — series of surreal run-ins with a length of rope, a tent, and other inanimate objects. (Hobart’s periodic and fruitless use of binoculars also evokes Clov in “Endgame,” a role that Mr. Rea played in 1976 under Beckett’s direction.) But the closer antecedent can be found much nearer to home: Hobart and his contemptuous doppelganger are dead ringers for Austin and Lee, the combative brothers at the center of Mr. Shepard’s “True West.” Once again we have the big-city culture maven, all too willing to make a buck by strip-mining the archetypal West, and the malevolent naysayer who goads the other into unwise decisions. The two plays’ finales even have a quirky sort of symmetry, though the final image in “Kicking” is far odder (and, to be fair, awfully amusing).

But as that earlier, far more nuanced play suggested, authenticity can only be obtained through action, preferably undertaken among the elements. “You’ll have to stop fighting in the house,” the brothers’ mother announces upon finding them in a battle to the death. “You’ve got the whole outdoors to fight in.” This time, Mr. Shepard gets his leading player out of the house, but with nobody to keep him company except a prissy imaginary friend; the result is a man who has no choice but to do ever-diminishing battle with himself, mulling over the same topics again and again. And when a play is literally about beating a dead horse into the ground, the danger of recapitulating and re-recapitulating such ideas is all the more pronounced.

Very little of this can be blamed on Mr. Rea. His logy eyes and creaky gait effectively convey a city slicker who has grown nostalgic for his long-past days of roughing it, and while his vaguely inflected American accent has an undernourished quality to it, that might be intentional. (The occasional slip into Irish brogue is harder to explain away.) He labors to give Hobart’s he-said-he-said arguments a spark of irony or meaning or something, but this forthright approach remains at cross-purposes with Mr. Shepard’s meandering style.

Well into this slack and silly endeavor, Hobart receives brief and mysterious solace from — I wish I were kidding — a nameless statuesque brunette (Elissa Piszel), who emerges from the grave wearing nothing but a slip and Hobart’s cowboy hat. Up until this point, “Kicking a Dead Horse” feels like the preoccupations of a middle-aged writer approached with the awkwardness of a young writer. The appearance of Our Lady of the Stetson and the Slip, though, is beneath even the greenest tenderhorn with a typewriter. It is the soggy contrivance of an irredeemably False West.

Until August 10 (425 Lafayette St. at Astor Place, 212-967-7555).