What year did Jesus think it was? – George Carlin

On the streets of Melbourne, two professional actors, Tom Hobbs and Lachlan Woods, play amateur preachers who substitute the Bible for a Stanislavski text on acting. The preachers are afflicted by a rain of canned laughter whenever they turn to the Bible and encounter the phrase I tell you most solemnly. Despite the absence of any descriptions of Jesus as prone to great bouts of laughter, the phrase hints at the possibility of a previous omission in the text; a change in tone as the result of an undocumented joke between Jesus and his audience.

If the medium is at least partly the message, the (amateur) public preacher's invariable lack of success in converting anyone at all suggests that he needs to examine his own role as a performer and take acting classes. If he is to avoid becoming just another clichéd street entertainer, what approach to acting should he choose? Perhaps ‘the method’ proposed by Konstantin Stanislavski could provide a suitable parallel to the process of transformation and redemption he speaks of. The work presents itself as a ‘witness’ to the raw material from which the preachers have been transformed—that being the two (professional) actors who play them, for free.

The pairing was based on the time-traveling scientists from the short-lived 1960s television show The Time Tunnel—a duo that was forever lost in time but nevertheless always reprieved through teleportation to another time and location at the end of every episode. Watching re-runs of this show as a child was a weekly ritual carrying as much weight as going to Catholic mass.