This essay is about the speculative possibility that live performance so chemically alters our bodies that we might find moments of connection—namely, love—despite the alienation that we live and labor under. As such, it must account for John “Ozzy” Osbourne. Osbourne was, variably, the lead singer of the radically heavy rock and roll group Black Sabbath, a solo artist of similarly influential acclaim, an addict, a scourge on Christian fundamentalists and the Parents Music Resource Center alike, a reality television star, a husband, and a father. He was, foundationally, a performer. We say ‘was’ because he died on July 22, 2025, at the age of 76.
Ozzy Osbourne was also a human being, a sometimes-gruesome, frequently-dazzling club of which I also count myself a member. By virtue of that membership and my therefore relative lack of divine perspective, I am definitionally unable to speak with certainty over how many other human beings died on July 22, 2025. Presumably, the answer is: many. It is a testament to our species’ occasional gruesomeness that some deaths go heralded while the vast majority die without much notice at all. Most deaths, I think you would agree, deserve notice. We all deserve to be more than a statistic. Thankfully, that same damned human species invented a thing called a ‘camera,’ a device which attests to all our myriad examples of humanity by virtue of creating ‘film.’ This latter object, a cocktail of light, chemicals, and sound, resembles a kind of after-life glimpse. It is, near-magically, a performance of life.
And so thank you, Witas Concert Vids, which is the username to which we must send our gratitude. What I mean is: some incidental human being flipped up their smartphone (a unilaterally evil contraption, saved only by virtue of how it puts a camera in many human beings’ hands, by virtue of it allowing us to contact our crushes) just as Ozzy Osbourne performed “Mama, I’m Coming Home” for the last time, 15 days before he died, and uploaded the ensuing film to the internet. It is a far better eulogy for Ozzy than any of us could pen, mostly because it comes from his mouth. Any time any of us open our mouths, we express the sound of our own dying. I don’t say this out of despair, it’s just how the human body works, a little wound-up line ray that starts expiring as soon as it starts making noise. Our lovely dying-aloud feels more acute, perhaps obviously, the closer we get to our end. Syllables become more precious, breaths harder but sweeter to draw.
Language, too, is reboldened. Ozzy mostly didn’t write the lyrics he sang, in Black Sabbath and later. He didn’t play the instruments either, which means he was essentially an interpreter, translating other body’s poetries through his own. It all came out with the only crucial feeling live performance needs to inspire, which is to say, immediacy. Every performance stays death, at least temporarily; so long as we sing, we breathe. But then, every curtain comes down, and every rehearsal allows us to rehearse our exit. What is the distance between Prospero’s “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free” and Ozzy’s “Times have changed and times are strange, / Here I come but I ain’t the same: Mama, I’m coming home”? It is love and it is dying. Presumably, this final performance (billed as “Back to the Beginning”) will be gathered together handsomely and released as an elegiac spectacle. But I admire the distances it has traveled to get to us in its present form, the anonymity of the eyes behind the lens, the gentle unclarity of the human being who, author-like, wanted only to enlist a camera to help us see how we might be changed by the intersection of art and human beings.
Orson Welles was fond of connecting the Latin word amare to our more familiar ‘amateur.’ We become expert artists because of love’s investment, not capitalism’s.
So much of art-making starts at the intersection of commerce and creation; rendering the business of being alive frequently depends upon business’s indulgence. And so, I celebrate the community theater instinct of this incidental cameraperson. What more precious cudgel against dull literalism and fascist careerism do we have than community theater, that mutant punk-cum-Rotary Club outfit? Like the hobbyist urge of crafters and watercolorists, a divestment from the profit model isn’t strictly a signal towards dalliance. There is rigor here, unencumbered by the BFA urge to metabolize feeling in those vulgarest of currencies: gross and growth.
And indeed, many performance-goers the country over might remind you that the best production they ever saw of Shakespeare’s Othello was in a paint-peeled Cape Cod bandstand, that the purest rendition of Sondheim’s “Every Day a Little Death” was ached out by an unknown fortyish man at Marie’s Crisis on a Tuesday evening. Karaokely-speaking, I once saw Sebastian Bach—whose band, Skid Row, released their opus Slave to the Grind in the same 1991 breath as Ozzy’s No More Tears—sing “Heaven on Their Minds” at Georgie’s in Asbury Park. More divine weeping than public relation, it was a vital reminder that our capacity to opt into the amateur’s vibrancy remains intact even as we professionalize. Apocryphal as ever, Orson Welles was fond of connecting the Latin word amare to our more familiar ‘amateur.’ We become expert artists because of love’s investment, not capitalism’s.
There are other, grander filmic imaginings of what theater means to the people who make it (remember, an audience makes theater too), but no film better celebrates community theater’s peculiarly turbulent power as an organizing force than Who Am I This Time? Adapted from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s 1961 short story by Morton Neal Miller and directed by Jonathan Demme—the only filmmaker other than Welles who could plausibly be called a ‘community theater director’—the film is less than an hour long. It is the fourth episode in the first season of American Playhouse, an anthology program from The Public Broadcasting Service, beamed out into households between 1982 and 1994. Retained in American Playhouse’s early programming is the radical dictum of the Children’s Television Workshop: despite TV’s nominal existence as an in-home outpost for advertising and the manufacturing of consent for American hegemony, its reach might be rejiggered to forward progressive and deeply human tendencies. Could TV make people more instead of less human? Sesame Street spread playful, educational programming into the urban households of families underserved by a deeply inequitable American public school system. American Playhouse transmitted art in much the same way, imagining the TV’s frame as a portal of public access to storytelling at the intersection of televisual, literary, and theatrical urges.
The programs that made up American Playhouse were frequently adapted from other literary forms. “Who Am I This Time?” was first published by Vonnegut in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post before it was included in his 1968 collection of short fiction, Welcome to the Monkey House. Like many of its cousin stories in Monkey House, “Who Am I This Time?” hangs a humanistic dilemma off of the abstract contraption of speculative fiction: what if you could only feel a feeling when you acted it? Harry Nash, its feeling-addled leading man, is a pathologically shy hardware store clerk who nevertheless transforms into a locally famous, fabulously dynamic stage actor in North Crawford’s Mask and Wig Club. Vonnegut’s unnamed narrator—tappped to direct the next local production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, despite his expertise being in storm window sales—rattles off Harry’s credits: “To give you an idea of how versatile Harry is, inside of one year he was Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, then Abe Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois and then the young architect in The Moon is Blue.” The verbiage isn’t lost on Vonnegut. Harry was these people. But off the stage, he mostly wasn’t.
A page later, Vonnegut’s narrator-director runs into Helene Shaw, new in town and only there as long as it takes to teach the other telephone company girls how to use the brand-new automatic billing machines. (Vonnegut reminds us, across time, that contemporary anxiety over the dehumanizing urge of tech is nothing novel: “‘Well,’ I said, ‘as long as people have to come along with the machines, I guess we’re all right.’”) And so Helene is recruited to audition. “But Helene Shaw couldn’t act for sour apples.” And in a throat-lumpy scene for anyone who’s ever sat at the table during a community theater audition, Helene breaks down, knowing too well how she acts. “I’m a walking icebox, and I know it,” she sobs. “I don’t want to be the way I am…I just can’t help it, living the way I’ve lived all my life.” That all over the burning world, people insist on making art is one of our damned species’ great gifts. That so many of these art-makers are no-good is the backbone of community art: be unprofitable and flatly unproductive to every metric and you’ve unburied pure radicalism.
But Helene isn’t unhappy on a stage, she’s just unhappy: “You ask me if I’ve ever been in love…No—but I want to be. I know what this play’s about. I know what Stella’s supposed to feel and why she feels it. I—I—I—” and Vonnegut overwhelms his leading lady in that Hoosier-sharp economy of language: “and her tears wouldn’t let her go on.” That bad actors act anyway characterizes the noblest instinct of art; the absurdity of making poetry is less absurd than the absurdity of not making poetry. But that unhappy people cannot reconcile how they feel or adequately express the love they desire characterizes the too-common alienation of our cruel modernity.
Maybe you have a playwright’s brain for narrative twists. Sometimes it feels like the narrative necessity for something to ‘happen’ overrides the sometimes bad, sometimes transcendent weirdness of a given written moment, and “Who Am I This Time?” slip-slides from this almost-utterance of Helene’s “I Want.” Does Harry walk into the audition room at this precise moment, already metamorphosing from mousy clerk into knuckle-dragging Brando? Does the otherwise stopped-up Helene finally come undone with emotion and transform into a Stella as violently lit up as her ripped shirt of a husband? Does Helene fall in love with Harry through their every passionate rehearsal? Does she feel the crank of reality when he returns to his incommunicable set-dressing self after every performance? And does she gift him a copy of Romeo and Juliet as their play ends? “They never did show up to the cast party,” Vonnegut’s director-narrator demurs. “One week later they were married. They seem very happy, although they’re kind of strange from time to time, depending on which play they’re reading to each other at the time.”
I think I maintain, as I did at 17, that Vonnegut means his story to function as a kind of nightmare. “Who am I this time?”—Harry’s ask whenever one of his directors taps him for a new play—is the only indication that he recognizes the fractured nature of his identity and life. And by the end of Vonnegut’s barely ten-page story, Helene is asking the same question.
I have no proof of my despairing read other than the clipped words on the page and the eerie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers feeling they conjure in my belly. Acting can become pathological. The desire to be someone else co-exists with and then overrides the desire to not be who you are, a notion explored in Poe-like extremes in Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man (2024). Unlike that film’s protagonist, though, Vonnegut was no misanthrope. On the contrary, the self-declared humanist’s sentimental strain reveals a deep affection for humanity in spite of our humanity. But Vonnegut was a humorist in the vein of Mark Twain and Bill Hicks, and without a novel’s length to re-convince himself of our fundamental capacity for good, his short stories can occasionally twist like punchlines. Helene’s trade isn’t incidental—by the film’s end, she and Harry act more like machines than splaying, pumping people.
And so how is it, between the four lines that form a televisual frame, that Demme’s Who Am I This Time? is among the most romantic gestures ever set to film? Demme’s first change is emblematic of his fundamental shift: Vonnegut’s unnamed director-narrator is unnamed no more. He becomes, as it were, a witness just outside the performances. We first meet George Johnson (Demme regular and Teaneck native Robert Ridgely) as an ensemble member, looking on as Harry Nash as Cyrano prostrates himself amid Rostand’s syllabic plumage. This first scene of action follows the opening credits, a photographic montage of Hinkley, Illinois (standing in for Vonnegut’s fictional North Crawford), atop a playfully upright John Cale (!) piano score. By introducing Harry in action, pulling back a single shot to slowly reveal the stage’s frame and the rinky auditorium that the Mask and Wig Club calls home, Demme and his collaborators decide that this is a story about relationships in the community, rather than ones outside of it. By introducing the audience avatar as a genial everyman—the first lines George gets are “Pull the curtain…pull the curtain!” shout-whispered to a moustachioed stagehand verklempt at Harry’s dramatics—the filmmakers similarly signal that this is a human story. Humans miss cues, tear up without warning, keep trying to save the show. Unlikely as it seems sometimes, humans fall in love, too.
Our stagehand does close the curtain, slowly, squeaking, excruciating. A quick shot follows, essential: a five-second slow pan across the audience as they react. Some are rapturous (a few girls leap to their feet quickly; Helene isn’t the only one swooning over Harry), some clap politely without rising, still others seem a little bored, and most smile big at the magic trick of turning a midwestern community hall into 17th century France, however briefly. In Stop Making Sense (1984), another tale of odd birds finding communion, Demme holds the audience off until the concert’s final number. Here, he shows them before we meet our leads or even truly know our story. I have never seen another community theater audience as accurately or affectionately rendered.
How is it, between the four lines that form a televisual frame, that Demme’s Who Am I This Time? is among the most romantic gestures ever set to film?
The direct-to-camera close-up is a familiar fixation across Jonathan Demme’s films. Here, not but five shots in, an audience member walks towards the camera, flowers outstretched before her, before we cut to a shirking Harry up on stage, under whose false nose is Christopher Walken fresh off of his soft-shoe striptease turn in Herbert Ross’s Pennies From Heaven (1981) and right before starring in another literary adaptation, David Cronenberg’s brain-horror rewrite of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1983). He plays Harry as Jekyll and Hyde, utterly incapable of choking out words in his real life but possessed of mad grace when in character. Walken lights his eyes up, something many other actors think they can do. Demme found his Helene in Susan Sarandon, who’d just shot Tempest (1982) alongside Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, and Raúl Juliá, fellow actors who could’ve been in Vonnegut’s fictional theater troupe. Sarandon breaks open the icy short fiction machinery of “Who Am I This Time?” twice over, first in her delivery of Helene’s audition room declaration of desiring desire, and then again, consistently, as Stella. It’s criminal we never got to see her deliver Williams’ full dialogue on a stage live, though, having reached plum Blanche age, perhaps some intrepid storm window salesman will correct this deficiency.
Like Daniel Fish’s vaunted, haunted 2018 production of Oklahoma!, the changes in feeling Demme wrings from Vonnegut’s visions have little to do with textual revision. Most every detail from the original short story is transmitted over, with whole sentences intact, a smart choice—Vonnegut’s plainly stylistic voice, as much Capra as it is later Wes Anderson, provides the ideal more-life baseline required in cinema. All Demme does is put the story in human bodies. His Helene and Harry aren’t theoretically tragic because they have been rendered in the familiar biology of human hiccup: Walken looks up at Sarandon, then looks away. Without dialogue, we see how he wants his life to be, even if he can’t make it that way without the aid of a script. And Sarandon plays, with her shoulders, frustration, an in-between feeling easier to see in the body than read in a book. Many filmmakers are credited as ‘actor’s directors.’ Many filmmakers love actors. But I don’t know of any as quietly, elegantly attuned as Demme is to how the camera itself is the pen that writes this extra-language sensation legible in the air. That direct-to-camera close-up is a moral imperative: it turns the machine-like watching of a camera into a character itself. In Demme’s cinema, the only way to express an incidental cameraperson is to include them as a member of the dramatis personae.
Most of the text Demme and Miller do add isn’t theirs—it’s fitting that their Harry and Helene spend the last few moments of the film falling into marriage via the words of another radical humorist. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is a perfect comedy, turned as it is on mixed and mashed-up identities and a chummy despair over polite society. Playing Jack and Gwendolyn’s engagement scene on the sidewalk outside of the hardware store, Demme gives his audience a chance to see Harry and Helene’s arrangement in action. Rather than hiding behind someone else’s words out of a fear of saying their own, this is how two people find mutual connection in a common (community!) space. And then the coup, as Walken, playing a few different characters, confesses: “Well, really, Gwendolen, I must say that I think there are lots of other much nicer names. I think…Harry, for instance…it’s a charming name.” Sarandon juts her eyes wide, an almost microscopic gesture that ferries total understanding of what he’s just offered her. These words are a space for feeling the world. They’re vital to Harry, who, like Augie by way of Jones Hall by way of Jason Schwartzman in Asteroid City (2023), occasionally needs to rush off stage to process an emotion. This isn’t the absence of feeling, an accusation too-often levied against people like Wes Anderson and Harry Nash and Helene Shaw, just a different adaptation of it.
And then they kiss, Demme’s camera close, Cage’s score burbling up as if conjured by the heat in the characters’ mutual gazing. A camera is a tool for showing what’s not there, but it’s also a machine that proves, over and over again throughout our history, what love can look like. It’s telling that as it pulls back, Helene and Harry bashfully smile, as there’s the whole ensemble of players hooting and cheering for them. The camera, in a Jonathan Demme movie, is just another member of that moveable ‘we.’
Depending on where you live, community theater can save your life. Depending on what your life looks like, your ‘we’ might be homogenous, even inchingly and chillingly identical. It’s all too easy in America and elsewhere in 2025 to only talk to people like you, who have your experiences. The urge to make art together, then—and to have that urge leap across generations, perspectives, and histories—is a palpably radical mode of solidarity. If we are bonded, you and I, she and them, Ozzy and Kurt, it may only be in how we know our unified task is the learning of the lines: our lexicons, phenomenally disparate as they may be, cohere at the mad and perfect tongues of Shakespeare, Vonnegut, and each other. As a we, our lingua francas become Lerner, Loewe, and dinners chewed guerilla-style on our drives to rehearse.
Where does it end? It does—that’s all we know for certain. And rather than strut and fret our hours, we sing. There are so many bodies out of the frame of our cameras, no matter how devoutly we try to catch them. We can’t catch it all. We are always slipping through our fingers. On April 27th, 2007, two weeks to the day before he died, Kurt Vonnegut ended a speech at Clowes Hall in Indianapolis like this: “And I thank you for your attention. And I am out of here.” The man was a ferocious reviser: the first words, the ones that leave an imprint in your brain even as you weave through the sentence, are And I thank you. And so maybe “Who am I this time?” is a question about the moments montaged together that make up a life, a rumination on how this time is different from tomorrow. We change—we act, we perform—and we don’t do it alone. We never save all our lives but we do make new ones in the fugitive time spread across the moments. And if we didn’t meet in the Indiana church basement, the library multipurpose room, the pit of a Birmingham rock show, we mightn’t have met at all.