Susanna Fournier is Spending a Season in Hell with take rimbaud

About This Episode:

Playwright, director, and theatre maker Susanna Fournier joins Phil Rickaby fresh from rehearsal to talk about take rimbaud, her ambitious new production at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in association with the Howland Company. Inspired by Arthur Rimbaud's iconic prose poem A Season in Hell, the play is a decade-plus labour of love that explores what it means to be a young artist crashing into the hard realities of the industry — and what happens when you refuse to take the path of least resistance.

Susanna and Phil dig into the state of Canadian theatre with refreshing candour: the fear of artistic risk, the pressure to program safe and familiar work, and what it costs artists, emotionally, financially, and creatively, to keep showing up.

From graduating the National Theatre School and navigating the post-theatre-school identity crisis, to collaborating with director ted witzel and the Howland Company across twelve years of drafts, workshops, and rewrites, Susanna reflects on what it means to grow up inside a play; and what it takes to finally let it become what it needs to be.

This episode explores:

• What take rimbaud is, and why Rimbaud's A Season in Hell still feels urgently relatable to artists today
• The culture of artistic risk-aversion in Canadian theatre and why safe programming may be slowly destroying the art form
• Why theatre may actually become more essential, not less, in a world where AI is replacing on-screen performers
• The millennial anxiety baked into the play, and what twelve years of drafts taught Susanna about herself as an artist
• And much more!

Guest: ✍️ Susanna Fournier

Susanna Fournier is an award-winning Canadian playwright, theatre maker/director, and educator. Her play texts include: The Empire Trilogy (The Philosopher’s Wife, The Scavenger’s Daughter, Four Sisters), take rimbaud, PYPER, Next Time I Die, HEART/BODY, Always Still the Dawn, and antigone lives*. Her work centres on form-as-meaning and holistic dramaturgies. As an educator, she is the Artistic Director at Armstrong Acting Studios where she shapes performance pedagogy for beginner to master-level actors. She’s taught and lectured at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative School, Etobicoke School of the Arts, Randolph College, and Cawthra Park Secondary School.

Connect with Susanna Fournier:

🌐 Website: www.susannafournier.com

📸 Instagram: @_susanna_f

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