"WOW! I absolutely love those 2 tapes! I would love to write a Substack about them and talk about the infrathin difference made by time and location and state of being… is that possible?"
This is my message to Australian actor Gerard Carroll when he sent me two tapes of the same monologue, taped 8 hours apart on location in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. Here's what he said in response:
"Sure! The two takes are clearly slightly different and I didn’t intentionally try to change anything, just that things had changed around me"
Gerard found himself on-set to shoot an advertisement for the supermarket chain Aldi. Here's the ad.
Gerard was in rural Australia. He was wearing an emergency worker's uniform. The environment was all about search and rescue. He had time to spare. It felt like the perfect opportunity to try an experiment with the verbatim monologue has had up his sleeve for years now, since he played “Smokey” in Alannah Valentine's play, DEAD MAN BRAKE (2003).
The play is ab…