Susanna Fournier and ted witzel on youthful rage, artistic risk and the decade-long process behind the world premiere
(Guest Writer: Alessandro Stracuzzi, a Toronto-based theatre critic and performance researcher with a focus on contemporary and experimental work. He writes for Stage Door and has contributed to Stratagemmi and Fermata Spettacolo.)
Revolution is exhausting. And one week before the world premiere of take rimbaud at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (in partnership with The Howland Company), the room seems to sweat that fatigue. Part of that is ordinary pre-opening pressure: lights to finish, tech to adjust, details to settle. But here, the tension feels more intimate. It carries the exhaustion of a project that has been lived with, argued over, and reimagined for years.
Speaking with playwright Susanna Fournier and director ted witzel, one quickly understands that take rimbaud is anything but a conventional bio-drama about the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud. Instead, they describe it as a love letter to artistic courage: to the anger, tenderness, burnout and formal risk required to keep imagining transformation in a world – and an arts sector – increasingly hostile to it.
Developed over more than a decade, the show grew from unstable material: intimate confessions, voice memos, opening nights, drunken parties, and the private-public sediment of Fournier and witzel’s artistic friendship.
Fournier calls this “holistic production dramaturgy”: an approach in which meaning takes shape from the unpredictable intelligence of the room. Even now, in rehearsal, the script keeps shifting. “You’re always responding to what is emerging, rather than following a predetermined plan,” Fournier says. “The work itself has agency, and we’re in dialogue with it. But that also means the composition can become nebulous.”
For witzel, that nebulousness is both the terror and the thrill of the process.
“It’s like trying to catch a cloud in a garbage bag,” he says. “You’re chasing it around, hoping to understand what shape it has.”
The result is a creative process in which no choice is ever isolated. Change one element and the consequences ripple through the whole structure. witzel calls it a “theatrical Rubik’s cube,” adding: “Thank God, I seem to have a pretty high tolerance for sitting in the middle of uncertainty and calling it rehearsal.”
That kind of uncertainty needs a particular kind of home: a theatre willing to give an unstable work time and room to find its shape. For witzel, Buddies offers that openness not only as an aesthetic value, but as an institutional one.
“Since I was a young, emerging artist, Buddies has mattered to me as a theatre that never broke my heart through a lack of courage,” he says. “This place embraces hazard and possibility; they are in its DNA.” In that sense, the show’s stubborn pull toward utopia, even in the shadow of catastrophe, feels like an ode to Buddies itself.
The set gives that relationship material form: it will use the Buddies Chamber as part of its design, drawing on materials already embedded in the space. “The production needed a design that could keep adapting as the piece changed shape and as new staging ideas emerged,” witzel says. “It had to stay open, responsive, and rooted in Buddies itself.”
The urgency to bring the show to life now, after years of excavation and revision, comes from a sense that the world around it has grown darker. Fournier points to pressures that have only sharpened since the pandemic: rising conservatism, political violence, exhaustion and an arts sector increasingly unsure of its own survival. Against that backdrop, the show argues for beauty as a form of resistance.
“We need new forms,” says Fournier, echoing Chekhov’s Kostya. “Because all of the systems and forms we’re using right now are so broken. They work for the people they serve, and that’s very few people. But forms are capable of opening up the imagination.”
But take rimbaud is also asking what happens when that hunger for new forms survives youth. Rimbaud died at 37, far from the literary life that would later turn him into a myth. Fournier and witzel have outlived the romance of the young, damned artist. They are now recognized figures in Toronto theatre, working inside an arts system that, as Fournier puts it, “tries to crush you.”
“Someone just gave me the keys. I don’t know why,” witzel jokes, referring to his role as artistic director at Buddies. But the joke points to one of the tensions at the heart of take rimbaud: the attempt to look back, from inside experience and institutional life, at the youthful and utopian rage.
When Fournier began writing the play, she was in her early thirties, newly arrived in Toronto and caught in the familiar, bruising journey of the emerging artist: trying to make a name for herself, driven by a desire for “artistic revolution”. The play lingers in that particular ferocity: the age before compromise has set in, before failure has done its quiet work.
“This is a manifesto about remembering what it is to be brave,” she says, “to be young, to really care about something, and to give yourself fully to it.”
That mix of courage and insubordination connects Fournier and witzel to the four poets the play summons to haunt the stage: Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, with the fever of 19th-century French poetic revolt; Sappho, with desire sharpened into crisis; and Sylvia Plath, with domestic life pressed into an instrument of terrifying clarity. By bringing these unruly ancestors into the same room, take rimbaud imagines rebellion as a lineage, a conversation across time and identity, held together by a fragile, shared yearning for change. Is revolution still possible? Or has power already given us just enough outlets to keep revolt from taking form?
The production runs May 6-23 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (in co-production with The Howland Company), 12 Alexander St, Toronto. For tickets: buddiesinbadtimes.com or call 416-975-8555.
