We’re back with our final Process Marginalia article of the 2025 – 2026 theatre season! If you’re new to Buddies’ blog, Process Marginalia is a series written by our lead season artists about the process of making their shows, and some of the references, strokes of inspiration, and notes in margins that influenced the final product you’ll see on stage.
Susanna Fournier is the playwright behind take rimbaud, a genre-bending performance poem that traverses 2014, the French revolution, and the end of the world. A Howland Company production in partnership with Buddies, the world premiere of take rimbaud runs at Buddies from May 6 – 23, 2026. Get tickets here and read on for some of the work behind the work.
1. BOOKS THAT MAKE YOU WORK FOR IT.
I’d never heard of Rimbaud until 2014 when I found myself staring through the window of a used bookstore at a red-covered book. ARTHUR RIMBAUD, A Season in Hell. I remember thinking, GREAT TITLE — and — I spend many seasons in hell. A ghostly image of something equally skull and embryo-looking behind the text stared back at me. I bought the book. I had no idea what it was. Thus began some feral literary baptism. Not long after, a sound artist friend who moves within niche circles of academia introduced me to #ACCELERATE, a collection of accelerationist writings edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Both books plunged me into worlds, language, and ideas I had to work at and work for to find my way into. The words blasphemy and density come to mind when I think of both texts, and I began to wonder what would happen if I smashed them into each other onstage.
2. ALCOHOL.
Between 2008 and 2019 how and where and who I drank with was as influential to my development as an artist as the theatre I was making/seeing and/or craving/hating. A new generation of bartenders in Toronto were launching a liquid renaissance. Infusions, fresh ingredients, niche spirits, reimaginations, and the ascension of pre-prohibition style cocktails. Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire dominated television and men everywhere started getting better haircuts, wearing vests, and talking about the shape of ice.
We, the millennial hipsters, had arrived.
Anything reminiscent of the suburban wastelands we’d fled from was discarded. We
wanted style. Atmosphere. Local charcuterie. Sazeracs. We wanted the luxe of the lost generation but with full sleeve tattoos. We spoke in bourbon, whiskey, mescal, gin. Oysters at sunset, an absinthe for the road. While the normalcy of smoking began to wane, we still opted in — especially at 3AM, for anything hand-rolled, and the pleasure of smoking inside in European cities.
I was serving six nights a week and drinking at each new speakeasy, tapas bar, members-only club, or cocktail competition as it emerged. The flourishing creativity of the bar scene was giving me something established theatre was failing to at the time – making good on its promise that I would be transformed simply by walking into a dark room with people I didn’t know after the sun went down. It wasn’t about getting drunk. It was about making and participating in ritualized magic.
A bunch of people who cared were obsessed with advancing a form. When this happens, a scene flourishes.
The entire first draft of take rimbaud came together in a 30-day period in which alcohol was present in my bloodstream more often than it wasn’t. I made some inspired choices in that period and some terrible ones too.
I’ve done a lot of things in the name of art.
You cannot make a play about transgression without a relationship to transgression. While I don’t think anyone needs alcohol to make art, there is a reason it’s called liquid courage and in moments it was mine.
I quit drinking in 2020. Looking at my remaining tumblers, copitas, shot glasses, and the
absinthe spoon I now burn incense on; I wonder if audiences will know which parts of
take rimbaud were written during my drinking days and which from my sobriety.
3. “SCOTT & ZELDA” BY TINY VICTORIES.
Look, you can’t print other people’s song lyrics without asking permission, so just go listen to the song. I first heard this song the same weekend ted witzel turned 30 and held a cottage party to celebrate. Our pack of emerging (forever emerging) actors, writers, and directors loaded into a pontoon boat to lose ourselves in someone else’s darkened room on an island across the lake.
They next day, we read the first scenes of take rimbaud around a campfire as coffee brought sunlight — and ourselves — back into focus. We were in and out of love affairs. We were artists making work for ourselves, for fun, for sex, sometimes even for money, for each other. We were orphans on speed boats, perpetually dehydrated but unbothered by it. We both knew and didn’t know what we were capable of.
4. A SCENE.
As evidenced by point two, artists need a scene. Especially alternative, indie, queer, and
new artists interested in advancing form, figuring out who they are, or who otherwise feel
unmoved by the work being done within institutions.
The scene surrounds the artists and holds their art, conversations, dreams, manifestos, parties, gossip, inevitable love affairs + break ups, debates, and multi-decade collaborations. There is no such thing as individual genius. You help birth the scene by showing up and it births you by giving you an arena to work, dream, and play in.
You need a scene because you have no way of knowing whether a conversation beside the snack table at the launch party of a new indie theatre group called The Howland Company will start a 12-year, on again off again relationship developing your experimental, perpetually unfinished, and hard-to-program theatrical work. If there is no scene, there is no snack table, because there are no artists gathering to talk and rant with one another.
The blurs of festival openings, Rhubarb-Summerworks-Fringe, salons, and the late-night
walks home from the Toronto indie scene in 2012 – 2019 permeate this text.
I know Covid came in and shut it all down and Toronto is ungodly expensive and we’re all working too hard. I get that. But if there is no scene, there is nowhere for anything or anyone to incubate, no engine advancing theatrical form and thus nothing controversial, daring, surprisingly alive has the chance to be born.
There is a lot of dead theatre in this town. And we can keep Weekending-At-Bernie’s this shit forever, but Please. Dear. God. Artists. GATHER. MAKE STUFF. GO TO STUFF. We are not competing against each other for scant resources, we’re competing against the widespread isolation and apathy of humans fueled by endlessly available, brain-numbing, short-form digital slop whispering to us from our stupefying phones.
5. A VOICE MEMO APP.
As a geriatric millennial, I’ve used so many versions of voice note / voice memo features on several models of smartphones. There are hundreds of minutes of recordings between ted witzel and me about this play, about breaking up with theatre, about sexual health, lost luggage, dying pets, ex-partners, and details about European monarchs during the holy roman empire. Rimbaud’s generation left us manifestos in collections of handwritten letters while we’re leaving hours of exquisitely meandering minutes somewhere in the cloud.
