Who Am I This Time? 1982

Harry Nash, a hardware store clerk, has achieved a degree of local celebrity thanks to his powerful performances in community theatre. Yet when not on the stage or in a rehearsal, he retreats into an insecure and painfully shy personality, slipping back into social withdrawal after a Cyrano de Bergerac performance.

Helene Shaw, a billing expert at a telephone company who intends to stay in town for only eight weeks, is persuaded by the production’s director to audition for the role of Stella, opposite Harry Nash’s Stanley Kowalski in a staging of A Streetcar Named Desire. Initially stiff and awkward during the audition, Helene finds a spark when Harry arrives, already fully inhabiting his Stanley persona, and the pair share a volatile but compelling chemistry.

The first night’s performance of Streetcar is a sold-out triumph, with Harry and Helene delivering top-form performances and earning enthusiastic applause. After the curtain falls, Harry disappears again, leaving Helene to contend with his abrupt exits. She falls in love with his onstage energy and decides to stay in town to coax him out of his shell, even as she grapples with his pattern of vanishing after each show.

Her efforts to get closer are tested when Harry’s reticence returns. When she shares a sandwich and asks him about his family, he reveals he grew up an orphan and retreats, interpreting her questions as intrusions. Helene mistakes his shyness for rejection, misreading his silence as a personal rebuff and triggering a cycle of cautious progress and missteps.

On the closing night, Helene’s idea blossoms into a turning point: she gives Harry a copy of Romeo and Juliet. Stepping into the Romeo role, he reads the lines and speaks of love with a newfound confidence. This prompts a sequence of such recitals—he embodies Mark Antony, then Henry Higgins, then Henry V—before he makes a bold proposal to Helene as Ernest Worthing, in a scene from The Importance of Being Earnest. Their friends celebrate the engagement, and the director hints that the community eagerly anticipates their leads in the company’s next production.

Harry, now in Helene’s embrace, whispers something in her ear, and she interprets it as a final, revealing question:

Who are we this time?