The Empire

A Trilogy of Modern Epics

Susanna Fournier

• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780369102775
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Drama
• Index: Literature

Explore a world on the edge of change through three epic stories spanning five hundred years of imagined history, unpacking systems of power and what we are capable of in the pursuit of freedom.

The story starts in The Philosopher's Wife. Deep in the North, a philosopher exiled for promoting his atheist work amidst a bloody religious war yearns to ignite a revolution, but his personal life has collapsed into chaos. What begins as a desperate attempt to cure his wife's animalistic behaviour erupts into a power struggle between the sexes, unleashing violent reckonings while the world outside hurtles towards an epoch-changing revolution.

Over twenty years later, The Scavenger's Daughter examines the true face of empire as Northern forces continue to march against the South, "liberating" all who stand in their way. In a landscape blown apart by war, we follow Jack and Ash, orphan soldiers belonging to the Black Swan army, trying to survive the camp, toxic masculinity, and each other until they can be free. When Jack returns to camp, his freedom having been bought for him by a mysterious philosopher, he believes his new life is just around the corner. But as rations wear thin and the king seizes the opium trails, the camp is thrown into chaos, putting everything Jack and Ash have known—including Jack's first love, Sarah—at risk.

Centuries later, in Four Sisters, we meet Sarah again as a woman and former Madam who has survived death, the toppling of regimes, and centuries of war. When a mysterious plague breaks out, she is forced to relocate to a quarantined zone called "The Skirts" with four young girls who were orphaned by the women she once employed. But when a strange doctor arrives and discovers the girls are plague-positive, Sarah must decide whether to go ahead with an experimental treatment or none at all. As time itself begins to erode, this found family of women must face loss, love, and their individual struggles for power in a violent world.

For fans of Game of Thrones, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Mists of Avalon, The Empire is both foreign and shockingly familiar, leaving you asking, how did we get here, and where are we going?

The Scavenger's Daughter

Part Two

“The Scavenger’s Daughter” is a medieval torture device. It works oppositely to “The Rack” by forcing the body into an unnatural and extremely painful compression.

Think fetal position taken to the extreme.

How to Read The Scavenger’s Daughter

In this world “House” with a capital H means a brothel. The term “Miss Emma” is slang for morphine.

Dialogue with a slash ( / ) in it means the next person starts speaking overtop the current speaker and their voices are overlapping

C-A-P-S W-I-T-H D-A-S-H-E-S indicates someone is spelling a word, letter by letter, out loud.

***Dispatches can be a lot of things.

They can be memos from headquarters on how the war is going—directives and instructions. They can be secret inner monologues going on inside a character’s head. They can be howls cut from the throat of history. They can be a warning, a lament, a protest. Whatever they are, they interrupt us and change the course of our lives.

There are twenty-six scenes for the twenty-six letters Jack learned in order to start a new life. The scenes are titled. These titles are known only to you, the reader, and not known to the people inside the scenes. Meaning only comes after the fact—the words we wished we’d said, the knowledge we didn’t yet have.

What’s most important to remember is that this story, this book, this world, this life . . . is a war.

Which means even though people said there were rules at some point, there aren’t rules anymore, and everybody comes to that realization differently.

The Play

A. I Come from My Mother

The eyes open but the mind is lost somewhere between waking and sleep.

Thoughts tumble through the dark towards the long journey still ahead.

Pulling on his clothes, a worn soldier’s uniform and combat boots, Jack speaks spelling out loud.

He speaks with the letters of an alphabet he’s only just recently learned, despite sixteen years as a Black Swan soldier and a member of All the King’s Children.

Jack: P-A-N-T-S.

I pull my knees up high all the way to my chin. I tuck my head and force my nose into the small gap between kneecaps. I push brow bone into knee bone and force my head down.

S-O-C-K-S.

Head down. Head down. Clutch my shins and press myself in from all sides. Force the air out of my lungs until I can almost feel one side touch the other.

B-O-O-T-S.

Hold this position. Hold this position. Hold this position until my mother comes.

Don’t come don’t come don’t come—

S-H-I-T—no—S-H-I-R-T.

She comes from the market with meat in her hand. She screams and bleeds and dies.

She is murdered and I W-A-T-C-H.

Dirt. My face. Dirt. My face.

Hold this position, hold this position, hold this position. Wait for her to come again. She doesn’t.

***dispatch: because the black swan marches on and history is written by the victors

Years one through five we sent the legions south

To rise against the tyranny of the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• The Birth of a New Age
• The Philosopher’s Wife
• The Rise Of The Black Swan
• The Scavenger’s Daughter
• What a Difference 259 Years Can Make . . . ?
• Four Sisters
• Afterword
• Schedule A: An Afterword by ted witzel and Leora Morris
• Producing The Empire by Alison Wong
• A Writer’s Note on Impossibility
• A Writer’s Note on Gratitude
• The Reader Edition, Theatrical Productions, Podcasts, and Online Archive
• The Museum
• Photo Gallery
• Production History
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright