Featured Member — Susanna Fournier
Each month we interview member playwrights to share their work, stories and inspiration with the community. We recently spoke with Susanna Fournier, 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, Ghosts of My House, 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.
www. susannafournier.com
Tell us how you got your start writing plays.
I was always interested in telling stories. When I was a kid, my friends and I would stage our own adaptation of fairy tales for our parents. We made most of them farces and our heroines never ended up marrying anyone. In grade eight, I volunteered to do the cuts and adaptation for our school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I inserted a section in which Helena lip syncs Celine Dion’s “All By Myself”. I went to the same arts high school as fellow playwrights Jordi Mand and Michael Ross Albert, and the program had us creating our own material often (I guess it stuck).
Throughout my actor training at National Theatre School of Canada, I would get up at 6am to write — equally obsessed with hanging out with the playwrights and drinking way too much coffee as I was with learning my lines and acting. I wish I could still drink that much coffee and talk about writing all day without developing heart palpitations and dehydration. Eventually, I started self producing at festivals like Next Stage, Rhubarb, and Fringe, which is how my work first met audiences.
You describe yourself as a “formalist” when it comes to playwriting. Can you share what that means to you, and how it shows up in your work?
If we look at the word transform, it tells us very clearly that we must change forms. As a formalist, my main goal is to make work that is transformative, work that changes and challenges our expectations of what theatre can be through its forms and structures. When we challenge form, we challenge governing systems — whether these be operating in society, in how we tell our stories, or in ourselves.
When I’m composing, I’m not just writing dialogue and action. I’m questioning how meaning is expressed at the structural level. My texts don’t follow conventional theatrical “rules” and often combine known forms in strange or unexpected ways. We could watch 30-minutes of a character-driven drama only for the play to then “break” and become a different form, like a lecture or movement sequence. These two modes might be exploring the same themes but are posing questions in different ways, and new possibilities emerge when we experience these things side by side. When you change forms onstage, you are revealing that the theatrical “reality” is not fixed. Just like our own reality is not fixed. When we break open a form, we create the possibility for new stories, new worlds, and new ways of being. We transcend the perceived limits we have created in our theatres, in out societies, and in our selves.
You received the 2025 Theatre for Young Audiences Award at PGC’s Tom Hendry Awards for your play Pyper, which was also recently produced at the University of British Columbia. Can you tell us about what inspired you to write this piece, and what it meant to you to win the Tom Hendry Award?
It meant so much to have PYPER recognized by the Tom Hendry Awards — especially because I’m a formalist. It meant a lot that the jury was especially drawn to the play’s playful structure. PYPER was created in conversation with the drama department at Cawthra Park High School. The students and I met over the course of two years to talk about how technology and social media have impacted their lives as digital natives. Our conversations informed how these themes are explored in PYPER, which follows a cast of ten AI-cyborg teenagers racing to create a time capsule before they’re rendered obsolete. The play itself acts as their time capsule as they trace their origins back to a mysterious piper.
I was inspired to write the piece because of how prominent technology has become in our lives, especially the lives of kids and teens. I wanted to create a space through this piece for us to talk about how these forces impact us, especially inter-generationally, and the anxiety most teens are facing growing up online.
Two of your plays will have world premieres in 2026, with take rimbaud premiering at Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto ON from May 6–23, and Ghosts of My House premiering at Here For Now Theatre in Stratford ON from July 8–19! What have the experiences of bringing these plays to the stage been like for you, and what do you hope audiences will take away from the productions?
It’s a wild ride to have multiple premieres in the same year!
I began writing take rimbaud in 2014. I have a joke that I can’t seem to get a play done in less than ten years, so this one’s a mature vintage. I began writing this play for The Howland Company when they were a new company looking for material that had big casts for young people. I’d stumbled across an edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and without knowing anything about Rimbaud, thought, “What a great title, I feel like I spend many seasons in hell.” I picked up the poem and — like many people — fell in strange love with his epic, sprawling, fever dream. I was reading Sylvia Plath’s journals at the time and wondered what it would be like to put characters inspired by these artists in a play together. Thus began a 12-year on-again-off-again romance with me and the play, which has been through more iterations than anything I’ve ever written. It’s a very adventurous work, grappling with love triangles, social theory, economics, identity, ennui, and a lot of dark humour honouring the free spirit (and chaos) of poetry’s ‘enfant terrible’. I am not sure if by staging it I have set my playwriting career on fire, because the play asks a lot of uncomfortable questions about how we think of and program contemporary art. We’ll see, I guess!
Ghosts of My House is a piece I wrote much later in my own development as an artist and while it also jumps around formally, it’s less of a manifesto and more of an intimate examination of family. Specifically, what happens to a family when grief wages a war with the past and takes the present hostage. It’s inspired by Agamemnon and through dark humour, dramatic scenes, and direct address examines the roles women are often asked to play within their families, themselves, and society, and what happens when they cast those roles off. I love that Ghosts has found its premiere in the beautifully intimate space Here For Now has cultivated in Stratford. The piece centres on the idea of presence — what is means to be present in one’s life — and having the audience get to be so close to the performers, really immersed in the action, is ideal.
Is there a piece of advice that you wish you’d been given at the beginning of your playwriting career?
If I could go back in time, I would tell myself:
WRITING IS A PHYSICAL ACT THAT LOOKS LIKE A LOT OF THINGS. Sure, there’s lots of thinking, but writing is going to MOVE THROUGH YOUR BODY IN DIFFERENT WAYS. Sometimes you will actually be writing at a desk, but you will also be slumped over a notebook, walking the city, listening to a song on repeat for hours, reorganizing the furniture in your apartment, reading, people watching, not knowing what to buy at the grocery store, crying — laughing — ranting, doing any number of things that might look nothing like ‘writing’ but are still writing and they are still happening to and through you. Take care of your body. Treat it well. Let it walk, dance, rest, eat, and give up sometimes. Oh, and set up ‘dark mode’ on your laptop to save your eyes SOONER.
Also: BE THE CHOOSER. DON’T WAIT TO BE CHOSEN. Know what you can control and what you can’t. Producing your own plays will give you tools that empower you beyond any other tools.
What are you working on next?
I am writing a new play with Cawthra Park Secondary School exploring the changing landscape of education. It explores the rising teacher shortage, wide-spread decline in literacy rates, rise in anti-intellectualism and incivility in the classroom, and student mental health. Having had the chance to work in high schools over the last few years, I can’t believe how urgently we need to explore these stories.
Do you have any favourite Canadian plays, and/or which artists are currently inspiring you?
I have too many artists inspiring me — ted witzel, Leora Morris, Jill Connell, Amanda Acorn, Erum Khan, Cole Lewis, Tawiah M’Carthy, Evan Webber to name a few. My first intro to contemporary theatre was through Daniel Brooks and Daniel MacIvor, who hold a very special place in my heart. I’m lucky and proud to have come up with artists like Kat Sandler, Michael Ross Albert, Jordi Mand, Jordan Tannahill, Julia Lederer, and love seeing work by The Electric Company, Wake of Vultures, Rock Bottom Movement, Public Recordings and catching what’s brewing at festivals like Rhubarb and Summerworks.
Keep up with Susanna through her website, susannafournier.com, or Instagram @_susanna_f
Get more information about the premiere of take rimbaud at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto, ON HERE!
And get more information about the premiere of Ghosts of My House at Here For Now Theatre in Stratford, ON HERE!
Disclaimer: Playwrights Guild of Canada (“PGC”) is a national arts service mandated to engage and grow an active Canadian writing community. We promote Canadian plays around the world to advance the creative rights and interests of professional Canadian playwrights for the stage. The views of our members are their own. The opinions of PGC as an association remain neutral.
