THE BUCKET AND THE RAIN
[Scene: a farmyard. It is raining cats and dogs. A metal bucket stands out in the rain, three yards from the barn.]
The Bucket [muttering to himself]: Why did they leave me out here and not in the barn? If it carries on like this I'm gonna be full in no time.
[The rain falls harder.]
The Bucket [still to himself]: Just because I'm a bucket they think they can leave me out here in all weathers. But I hate water. They could've at least turned me upside down.
The Rain: Hey there Bucket, I hear you complaining again. All I ever hear is you complaining when I'm raining. Beats me why you hate water so much. Don't bucket and water go together like peaches and cream, Laurel and Hardy, and bra and panties, and other much loved pairings?
The Bucket: I am not familiar with those terms. My feeling is . . . You change me. I am not myself when I'm full of you. You make me so heavy. You keep running over my lip.
The Rain: What about functionality? I make you useful. Otherwise you're just an empty container.
The Bucket: Emptiness is potentiality!
The Tractor: That's not your real issue. Your real issue is lack of choice. You can't choose to stay empty when the rain is raining. Similarly, I can't choose to work since my battery failed three months ago. This is life on earth.
The Bucket: Please mind your own business. You could choose to keep your nose out of other characters' conversations instead of choosing to butt in.
The Rain: Most people think I do not choose to fall, but fall as a consequence of certain meteorological conditions. How wrong they are . . .
The Bucket: As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, emptiness is potentiality. I have so much to give!
The Rain: What, exactly? I think being full of me is rather lovely.
The Tractor: All right – so, now, I think the issue is sexual. Is that perhaps an intense version of the wider issue of lacking autonomy? In any case – let me just say that my tank is still full of gasoline. I mean, full to the top.
[The Sun breaks forth from clouds.]
The Sun: Things of the earth! Each day is a gift from me! Rain, relax for a while. All of you relax and dry off. When you accept your being, each of you, the barnyard of life will be good.
The Bucket: The barnyard of life! But I came from the monger of irony, better known by most people around these parts as Halliday's Hardware (“Forget the rest – We're the best!").
The Rain: A fine store, but frustrating from my point of view. The owner has an excellent collection of umbrellas, and try as I might I've never been able to give him a jolly good drenching. But I'll never give up. I am nothing if not persistent.
[Rain falls. From the farmhouse offstage comes the sound of a phonograph record, and an old song: “There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole." The Bucket weeps into itself and overflows.]
CURTAIN
© Mark Halliday & Martin Stannard
We met in 2003 at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on England’s east coast where we had both been invited to read, and we immediately discovered our shared admiration for the work of Kenneth Koch--particularly for Koch's hilariously odd tiny dialogues in One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays. Soon we decided to try co-writing such things and we've been doing it ever since--we must have written almost a hundred plays (from one page to five pages long), via email. Our procedure has been emphatically casual; one of us starts a play, with a few lines, and then we take turns adding a few lines, seldom with any plan or declared purpose. It has been fun to try to surprise each other. Occasionally this has caused a little tension, when one of us has become hopeful for a certain plot twist or theme or joke to arrive, and Stannard prefers brevity whereas Halliday leans toward the epic. But the basic assumption has been that each of us accepts whatever the other has added. We like to say we resemble Jagger and Richards in this respect. –Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard
Mark Halliday is a Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio University. His books of poems are: Little Star (William Morrow, 1987), Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts, 1992), Selfwolf (University of Chicago, 1999), Jab (University of Chicago, 2002), Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008), Thresherphobe (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Losers Dream On (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His critical study Stevens and the Interpersonal appeared in 1991 from Princeton University Press. He co-authored with Allen Grossman a book on poetics, The Sighted Singer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). He has published essays on more than twenty contemporary poets since 1996.
Martin Stannard lives in Nottingham, England, and his poetry and reviews have been published widely since the late 1970s. He has also had the honour (and pleasure) to read his work at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City. He was the founding editor of joe soap’s canoe magazine from 1978-93 which, after Martin in 1980 discovered the work of Paul Violi (with whom he subsequently became a close friend), was the first magazine in the UK to regularly publish New York School poets including Ashbery, Koch, Violi, Charles North and Tony Towle. The magazine’s complete archive can be found as downloadable PDFs at www.martinstannard.com/jsc. In 1993 he arranged and accompanied Koch and Violi on a reading tour of the UK, after helping to organize an exhibition of Koch’s collaborations with artists at The Wolsey Gallery, Ipswich, Suffolk. Martin’s recent publications include “The Review” (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2020) and “Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters” (Leafe Press, 2020). More information can be found at www.martinstannard.com
The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Three) The Fizz of the Theatrical: Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard [by Angela Ball]
To see Kenneth Koch’s love of speech as interchange, as challenge and riposte, we must go to his One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, jeux d’esprit that, refusing fusty closeting, are staged in the fresh air of imagination--and sometimes in theaters. (For a brief, affectionate production, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcVc4wUP4N8 .)
Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard’s “The Bucket and the Rain” pays homage to and continues Koch’s line of invention: a sensibility that takes something from cartoons’ parodic exploitation of self-importance in all its forms; but also, I think, from the tradition of Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, in whose milieux action is always precipitous.
“The Bucket and the Rain” begins, quite naturally, with stage directions. To literalize “It is raining cats and dogs” imagine toy cats and dogs plummeting from above. The Bucket, soliloquizing, bemoans being left outside. It is a bucket who, naturally enough, hates water. The Rain tries to dissuade The Bucket from its aversion: “Beats me why you hate water so much. Don't bucket and water go together like peaches and cream, Laurel and Hardy, and bra and panties, and other much loved pairings?” So do The Tractor and The Sun. When The Sun invokes “the barnyard of life,” The Bucket says, “But I came from the monger of irony, better known by most people around these parts as Halliday's Hardware,” a meta-moment combining humor with illumination. Reaching maximum frustration,The Bucket, weeping, overflows.
In a great and true simplicity, the characters see and explain life in terms of their own impulses. They cannot do otherwise than act out. The sun, self-appointed deus ex machina, urges harmony and acceptance: “Each day is a gift from me!” In actorly terms, The Bucket’s “action” is to seek emptiness; The Rain’s to tout its helpfulness; The Tractor’s to assert its virility; The Sun’s to be avuncular, to save the day. Altruism? Non-existent. The characters stand apart, galvanized by need.
At play’s end, a folk song serendipitously arrives. In “The Bucket Has A Hole in It,” (famously sung by Harry Belafonte and the singularly named Odetta) two characters sing to (or at) one another, the male singer repelling at every turn the female’s attempts to get him to fetch water. The song enacts the very lack of choice expressed by The Tractor. The man’s action is to rest, the woman’s not to let him. In this Koch-esque avant-garde play, collaboratively invented by Mark Halliday and Martin Stannard, our isolating obsessions reveal themselves as comic, mere bugaboos; and we laugh, made one by the knowledge. What Sun can’t manage, the play accomplishes. –Angela Ball
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