Theatre in Motion: Theatre Criticism with Vinson Cunningham

In Theatre in Motion, we discuss theatre's movement across stages, through time, and within communities with its creators and practitioners. 

This week, we talked about theatre criticism and its place in the theatre world with Adjunct Assistant Professor Vinson Cunningham.

Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, FADER, Vulture, The Awl, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Commonweal. In 2020, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his profile of the comedian Tracy Morgan. Cunningham is a former White House staffer under the Obama administration. His debut novel, The Party Year, is forthcoming from Hogarth/Random House.

What is your personal theatre history and how did you become a theatre critic?

Vinson Cunningham: It’s sort of scattershot. I mostly sang in high school. I think the first play that I was in was a musical—I was the voice of a plant in Little Shop of Horrors. After that, I did really get into theatre in college. I studied acting; I was in a couple of productions. I was Agamemnon in Electra, I was this weird party goer in The Cherry Orchard. But I mostly wanted to write. After graduating college, I didn't really have any interaction with the theatre until I was starting as a freelance writer, at which point I was freelancing for this very small paper called The Brooklyn Paper. And one of the things that they could pay me like almost nothing to do was write 400 word theatre reviews.

So I started going to productions and thinking about how to write about them. That was just a necessity of my work. Once I started at The New Yorker, I maybe wrote about a couple plays just as a thing to do, but it wasn't necessarily a big part of my remit. Soon, after a couple years, there just happened to be an opening, and then I started writing about theatre. There's no through line, necessarily. But one thing that I've always loved in my whole life is to read plays just as a part of my pursuit of literature. I think mostly—and it probably comes through in the way that I write about plays—if there is a through line along my way into theatre criticism, it's been theatre’s literary aspect. Even when I wasn't engaging with theatre in an embodied or professional sense, I was always reading plays.

Do you have a favorite playwright that you like to read?

VC: Oh, boy. Do I have a favorite playwright? I think it's probably Eugene O'Neill. I just like to read Eugene O'Neill. I love his sea plays—these historic plays where there’s always this absolutely miserable seafaring young man who hears howls from across the water and stuff like that. I've often read his plays just because. Also, as a writer, I just love the romance of him. The whole mythology that surrounds him—the idea that he was walking around with a trunk full of plays—has always appealed to me.

How do you approach theatre criticism? 

VC: I guess my approach to writing is for it to be a sight of not only beauty, but also excitement. It can be an embodied experience where you can feel the writer experimenting and improvising and thinking. One of my hopes for criticism is for it to be a place where somebody can think alongside you in the way that you think when you're in a seat at any kind of performance. The truth is that it's a mixture between performance, consideration or improvisation, and artifice or something. 

You do improvise when you write—well, I guess I shouldn't generalize, but I don't ever come to it with it all figured out. I'm swinging from branch to branch as I write, and so I want that feeling, even as I go back and edit. I want that initial performance that happens in the first draft to be visible and something that you want to follow.

How do you hope criticism functions in theatre as a whole?

VC: I think people come to criticism in many different ways. Some people come to it because they are theatre practitioners. They've directed or they’ve acted or they've been a dramaturg, and they want to be a part of a conversation. I come to it as somebody whose first concern is writing. I guess my art is prose. Theatre criticism is my way of practicing my art alongside another art that is its function. But I hope that anybody who likes to read would want to read my stuff. That is the great aspiration: even if you didn't see the show, if you like to read prose in English, I hope that you would want to read my work. More functionally, I think criticism is a part of theatre because it’s lasting. Yes, there's the script, which as I see it is a form of literature, but a production is ephemeral. Sure, there are recordings of productions that live in great libraries, like the New York Public Library branch at Lincoln Center and other things like that. But writing is one of the ways that we encase these things that evanesce the moment they happen. They no longer exist. Reading criticism is one of the ways that we speak through history to one another, and not just distant history. Say a show has closed and you didn't get to see it; the next month, you might want to know what it looked like.  

I also think that one of the great uses of the performing arts is that they happen at a time and place. They're necessarily bracketed by history, and they're placed in that history. It matters if something happens during, let's say, a pandemic. It affects the meaning of the thing. The meaning of an artistic object and its larger context, the only way to capture that, happens in the conversations we have after we see theatre. It happens in informal ways—but the only way to formalize that is through criticism, right? It’s the meeting of the thing and the world. I want to be the first improviser on the tune that I'm hearing when I see a show. And hopefully that improvisation is worthwhile enough that that initial meeting that I encase in my writing creates a sort of artifact that people want to carry through and continue building upon. 

What does that improvisation look like in your critical work? Does your placement as an individual in a specific moment in time come through in your writing? 

VC: Yes, I think something that criticism can help in encasing or making last is the process of thought that happens when you're watching something. I love a passage by the novelist Christopher Isherwood, where he's walking through Germany in the early days of Nazism, while whatever relative peace that existed before the second World War was fading. He tries to conceptualize himself as a recorder—an all-seeing eye—who takes in what he sees in this objective way. Of course, the rest of that book shows how that's impossible. I don't think there's any perfect, objective recorder of a theatrical experience. We all come in with our own lives and perspectives and baggage. Our responses can be very personal, but they can also be about what was in the headlines in the news that day, or what’s going on culturally. 

I've always found that really helpful—what distracts us in the theatre. So often I go to see theatre and I'm dutifully writing in my notebook, trying to be Mr. Professional Critic. But then my mind just goes somewhere. And then somewhere else. It might be my own life, it might be something I saw outside on 44th Street before I came into this theater, or anything. My first impulse is always to try to snap back to it, to try to go back into that mode of diligence. But what really is happening when you get distracted is that your subconscious mind, or unconscious mind, maybe, is making its own connections and showing you what happens when your brain goes and sees this thing. For me, it's a rule to bring my distractions into the piece. I feel like they belong there, and they can be a very generous offering to readers. 

What does your process of watching theatre look like? Do you take notes every time you see theatre, or only when you have to for work?

VC: I usually take notes, even if I know I'm not going to write about something. Writing is this very parasitic thing. I know I'm going to need stuff for a column. I've never been a journaler, but now I think of the notes I take while watching theatre as a kind of diaristic activity. Often there are distractions in there and I'll find myself writing down thoughts about the guy coughing behind me, or something like that. It becomes this whole thing—but I think it’s all useful. It’s very funny; even if I'm not seeing a particular show for work, I very seldom do not have a notebook with me now. It's part of my mechanism.

What moves or excites you when you see theatre?

VC: What moves me is when I'm able to see, at the same time, the artificial within reality. I love the moments when I'm able to see the actor as a person—a real person who, just like me, walked into the theater off the street—but also as an agent of inclusion. I am moved when I'm able to think about those two things at the same time. I always think about the ending of Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury. The play takes you through all these layers of artifice and spectacle and ways of winding down toward a certain kind of truth. And then at the end, the actor starts talking to the audience and invites certain members of the audience onto the stage and leaves others seated. She came out into the audience and I was sitting there with my wife and there was a moment of direct address and she was talking right to my wife. It just, all of a sudden, refreshed my sense of both who this person was, onstage and off. It was really beautiful.