Thomas Mitchell Barnet in Take Rimbaud at Buddies in Toronto's Bad Times Theatre.Wade Muir/Supplied
- Title: Take Rimbaud
- Written by: Susanna Fournier
- Performed by: Thomas Mitchell Barnet, Julian De Zotti, Ruth Goodwin, Rose Tuong, Breton Lalama, Hallie Seline, Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, Cameron Laurie
- Director: ted witzel
- Company: The Howland Company, in partnership with Buddies in Bad Times
- Venue: Buddies in Bad Times
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs until May 23
Critic’s Pick
“Only love can save me and love has destroyed me,” wrote British playwright Sarah Kane in her 1998 opus Crave, about a severed consciousness forced to contend with the inevitability of death – and the numbing effects of affection.
Crave – along with the rest of Kane’s canon of work – set a standard for poetic, feminist theatre that contends with the grubby realities of mental illness. The play named its four characters A, B, C and M, and was, for the most part, plotless, a tangle of atmospheres and ideas that came together in excruciating – if not altogether coherent – ways.
Take Rimbaud, Susanna Fournier’s biting, gorgeous jumble of a new play, follows neatly in Crave’s footsteps: Kane, who took her own life in 1999, is one of the many died-too-soon auteurs named in Fournier’s twin explorations of art and artists. (The titular French poet Arthur Rimbaud is another.)
In Take Rimbaud, Fournier drills into what it means for a writer to consider – and complete – the act of suicide, and in doing so, reaches the conclusion that, yes, only love can save us from obsolescence. But, in the spirit of Kane, Take Rimbaud establishes that love can destroy us, too – it can stealthily move into our apartment without paying rent. It can wash away our sense of self. It can give us gonorrhea; it can kill us.
Two stories unfold simultaneously on Ting-Huan Christine Urquhart’s punky set: In one, poet Sapph (Rose Tuong) must navigate a thorny relationship with Sylv (Ruth Goodwin), who unsuccessfully tried to end her life by sticking her head in an (electric) oven.
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Sylv, an echo of – who else? – Sylvia Plath, dreams of an expansive, prose-filled life, but more than once finds herself paralyzed by the choices that lie before her. Should she pursue marriage, the thing she desperately wants? Should she settle for Sapph? Or should she languish in dissatisfaction, never choosing either way as she fuels her writing with the pain of indecision?
Meanwhile, R (Thomas Mitchell Barnet) and Paul (Julian De Zotti) are on a journey of their own. They’re falling in love with each other – passionately, clumsily – but as individuals, they’re plummeting into the drug-addled chasms of their own minds, grasping at wisps of artistry without ever quite managing to hold on. Together, the filmmaking couple is toxic; apart, they’re even worse.
Fournier and director ted witzel weave these plotlines together with the help of an outstanding ensemble (Breton Lalama, Hallie Seline, Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster and Cameron Laurie), each of whom steps in to play small bit parts as needed. But throughout Take Rimbaud, these characters, named 1, 2, 3 and 4, also narrate the action of the production – not just the play – by calling for light, sound and video cues. They wear headsets that make them look like stagehands, an amusing flourish that adds to the overtly metatheatrical wit of Fournier’s script.
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It’s that self-referential cheekiness that makes Take Rimbaud feel like being let in on an inside joke. In the play, critics are lambasted for lacking teeth; social media discourse is skewered for ignoring context. Using her characters as chess pieces, Fournier performs an autopsy on feminist art and comes up empty-handed – in a neocapitalist world, her pawns argue, there is no worthwhile criticism (and very little worthwhile art). Basically, we’re all doomed.
Fournier could end the play there (and lose its Critic’s Pick designation by doing so). But instead of leaving the audience in a nihilistic freefall, she leans in. She and witzel blow up the work without giving us a chance to stand back, vaulting Take Rimbaud into an abstract, funny explosion of music and – yes, seriously – Honey Nut Cheerios.
The end result is a work that’s surprisingly joyful and pleasantly playful. And while it won’t land with everyone – the play is acerbic, complicated and very dark in places – Fournier’s latest script fits beautifully into the tradition of postdramatic feminist theatre that preceded it.
Take Rimbaud doesn’t romanticize suicide or poverty, nor does it conflate artistic greatness with tragic death. It pulls no punches about the dire state of contemporary art.
Instead, Take Rimbaud is a manifesto in every sense of the word. It’s an expression of belief in the resilience of artists, a celebration of the messiness of love. It’s imperfect, and, sure, a little overlong in places – but it’s also a vital snapshot of what it means to create in a world otherwise consumed by destruction.