TAKE RIMBAUD World Premiere is Coming to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
The performance poem traverses the worlds of Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Sylvia Plath, Sappho, and will open at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre this spring.
The 2025 - 26 Buddies in Bad Times mainstage season is the world premiere of take rimbaud by award-winning Canadian playwright Susanna Fournier (Pyper, The Empire Trilogy, LULU // aspects of a femme fatale), directed by Buddies' Artistic Director Ted Witzel (Roberto Zucco, Every Little Nookie, The Empire Trilogy's The Scavenger's Daughter). A Howland Company production in partnership with Buddies in Bad Times, the show runs from May 6 to 23.
It's 2014 in Toronto (hell) and 1871 in France (also hell). The poets torture themselves to make work that means something right now, but time feels slippery and no narrative can keep them safe. A performance poem traversing the worlds of Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Sylvia Plath, Sappho, and post-art school malaise, take rimbaud flirts with creation, revolution, and violence at the end of the world.
take rimbaud will be performed by Thomas Mitchell Barnett (Witch, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Netflix's Locke & Key), Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster (The Welkin, Seasons with the Shaw Festival and with Soulpepper Theatre), Julian de Zotti (USA/Netflix's Suits, CTV/NBC's Transplant, As I Lay Dying), Ruth Goodwin (Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Global TV's Private Eyes, The Wolves), Breton Lalama (The Inheritance Part 1 & 2, Crave's Really Happy Someday, Netflix's The Madness), Cameron Laurie (The Welkin, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Prodigal), Hallie Seline (The Welkin, The Merchant of Venice, Heroes of the Fourth Turning), and Rose Tuong (The Herald, Erased, Hamlet).
The creative team also includes set and Costume Designer Ting - Huan 挺歡 Christine Urquhart, lighting designer Darren Shaen, and sound designer Dasha Plett.
Says Buddies in Bad Times Artistic Director, and take rimbaud director Ted Witzel: "Susie and I have (together and separately) tried quitting art in various ways for as long as we've known each other, which is also about as long as we've been working on this play. Through all the years we've worked on it, we felt sure that this piece belonged first and foremost at Buddies, the only place that made a home for all our wildest impulses. Now, years later, what began as an unruly manifesto has evolved into something between a period piece and a love letter to our younger selves and to all the ecstatic ways we keep throwing ourselves back into a tormented love story with the hopeless thing that gives us the greatest purpose we've known."
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