Four poets, a sloppy love triangle, an unfinished art film and an electric oven: the final show of 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, the show runs from May 6 to 23. Opening night is May 7. Visit buddiesinbadtimes.com to learn more.

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.

Says Fournier: “I discovered Arthur Rimbaud the same year I was - to my horror - turning 30. I was captured by the ferocity of this iconoclast who became an icon and shocked at how relatable his experience of being an artist in the 1870s was to how my peers and I felt about it. At the time, I was a seemingly forever ‘emerging’ playwright crafting work more like Sarah Kane and Howard Barker than anything I’d seen in Toronto. I wrote take rimbaud again and again and again over the next decade, unfaithfully theatricalizing him and his poem, A Season in Hell, while pushing notions of interdisciplinary theatre to its breaking points. I call it ‘a performance poem for eight voices at the end of the world’. It’s both a love letter and a break-up-text to that exquisite, explosive brightness young artists detonate in a collapsing world.”

In keeping with The Howland Company’s history of ensemble-driven theatre, 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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take rimbaud

Show Run: May 6 – 23 at Buddies in Bad Times, 12 Alexander St. Toronto

Opening Night: May 7 / 7:30PM

Show Times:

Wed – Fri / 7:30PM

Sat / 2PM + 7:30PM

Mask Mandatory Performance: May 13, 7:30PM

Tickets: $10 / $25 / $45 / $75 + fees