Shy hardware store clerk Christopher Walken becomes a different person when performing in local theater; new arrival Susan Sarandon is cast opposite him in “A Streetcar Named Desire” without realizing that his Stanley Kowalski is just an act. This production for TV’s “American Playhouse” series was adapted from a Kurt Vonnegut short story and features music by John Cale.

Director George Roy Hill and screenwriter Stephen Geller (TV’s "Mission: Impossible") adapt Kurt Vonnegut’s sardonic exploration of the timeless madness of human existence, from wartime atrocity to middle-class mediocrity to interplanetary euphoria. Middle-aged optometrist Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) simultaneously exists in the past as a young POW in a German prison camp and in the far future as an elderly resident in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore (where he is memorably pampered by Valerie Perrine as the libidinous starlet Montana Wildhack).