What to know
- A long-awaited Toronto production explores how artistic myth and gendered legacy shape — and sometimes distort — the cost of creative survival.
- Take Rimabud examines who gets remembered, who gets erased, and what it truly takes to endure in the arts.
- Blending the life stories of poetic icons with a critique of the arts industry, the show questions the myths that define artistic greatness and the toll they take.
Four iconic poets, a messy love triangle, struggling artists and a Queer story. That’s what Take Rimbaud, a new play coming to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, is bringing to the stage.
There’s a moment for most young artists, playwright Susanna Fournier says, when the dream cracks.
It’s the moment they arrive in the city, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to begin “an artistic revolution” and instead collide with rent, job and housing precarity, and the brutality of trying to survive in Toronto while making their dream work.
“A lot of illusions are shattered,” Fournier told Queer & Now. “A lot of heartbreak occurs, and then it’s like, how do you live through that and keep going?”
That question sits at the heart of Take Rimbaud, Fournier’s long-awaited new play, now finally premiering after 12 years in development. The production reimagines a constellation of literary icons, including Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Sylvia Plath, and Sappho, as young artists navigating Toronto in 2014 and France in 1871.
But the story isn’t just a reimagining of history (Hello Bridgerton!), it’s a confrontation with the idea of the artist itself.
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Arthur Rimbaud: A Queer Inspiration
Describing the first time she read Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Fournier says she felt seen.
“It’s humming with such intensity,” she explained.
The poem, written just before Rimbaud gave up art entirely, follows a young artist drawn into a lush, seductive world, only to realize he’s actually in the depths of Hell. For Fournier, it mirrored her own experience coming of age in Toronto’s arts scene: the seduction of possibility, followed by the stark reality of sustaining a creative life.
“I think a lot of artists face this question when they start to actually try to make work in a city,” she explained, adding that many soon begin to question if they have the chops to make it in the entertainment industry.
“Because it’s a really harsh industry, whether you’re an actor, whether you’re a writer, whether you’re a filmmaker,” she explained.
The play’s 12-year process of development reflects that same tension between ambition and reality. First commissioned over 12 years ago, Take Rimbaud evolved alongside Fournier and her collaborators.
“It’s been this long on-and-off process,” she explained, adding that the team behind the show have developed their skills while working on the project for 12+ years.
What began as an experiment, attempting to “theatricalize” Rimbaud’s poem, slowly grew into a large-scale, design-driven production.
“I always aspire to make something that you’re like, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen that on stage before,’” she explained.
Critiquing gendered narratives and stereotypes
Fournier explained that the show is also sharply critical of the narratives that shape the identity of historical figures, especially when it comes to women. Explaining this, Fournier points to the stark divide in how artists are remembered.
“Male artists are typically remembered as heroes… and female artists become famous because of their destruction,” she said, pointing to Sylvia Plath’s death by suicide as an example.
Figures like Plath, Fournier argues, are too often reduced to their suffering rather than their craft.
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“Men can do seemingly whatever they want as artists and still be geniuses,” the playwright says, “Whereas female artists… are some anomaly.”
The production pushes back against these narratives, particularly the romanticization of artistic suffering.
“We have a lot of dangerous narratives,” she explained. “You have to be a starving artist. You have to be working in chaos. You have to be having a breakdown all the time.”
But this is not true, and Fournier says that overall, these narratives can distract from the true process of creating art.
Instead, through Take Rimbaud, she frames art-making as something both sacred and exhausting.
“You’re opening up your spirit, your body, to channel and listen really deeply to a frequency that’s trying to come into the world,” she says. “That is mentally draining, physically draining.”
Fournier added that exploring the tension that exists between transcendence and survival, between myth and reality, feels especially urgent now.
“Any creative person is up against such odds,” Fournier notes. “And I think those odds are only increasing with things like AI and generative technology [making us wonder] if any of us will have jobs.”
This means it’s not so much a question of if artists can “make it” in the industry, a framing Fournier rejects outright, but whether they can endure.
“I don’t think you’re a successful artist because you make it,” she says. “Whatever that means.”
Instead, Take Rimbaud asks something more difficult, and more honest: what happens after the illusion breaks, and what does it take to keep going anyway? Take Rimbaud opens at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre on May 6, and runs through the 23, with tickets now on sale.
