Vincent Cunningham
speaker
266 appearances
43 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Vincent Cunningham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you're feeling a little stressed out lately, not that I'm implying anything stressful is going on, you might do what Ayelet Waldman did and take up a hobby.
Waldman is a novelist, an essayist, and earlier this year she wrote a piece for The New Yorker about quilting. Waldman discovered that quilting was not just pleasant or useful...
You can read Ayelet Waldman's essay, Piecing for Cover, at newyorker.com. She spoke with Jeffrey Masters, a senior producer on our show.
The New Yorker Radio Hour · Sam Gold’s “Romeo + Juliet” Is Shakespeare for the Youth · 12 Nov 2024
podcast
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Vincent Cunningham, a staff writer for The New Yorker. There have been... At least 37 different productions of Romeo and Juliet on Broadway, not to mention countless high school productions. Maybe you were in one. I don't know. But this new one by the director Sam Gold is kind of a dark, clubby, Gen Z Romeo and Juliet.
It's as if the teens from Euphoria decided that they had to do Shakespeare, and this is what they came up with. The two stars are Rachel Ziegler, who you probably know from the latest movie version of West Side Story, and Kit Conner, who's from the teen Netflix hit Heartstopper.
I wanted to talk to Sam Gold partly just because I really admire his work, but also because I always have this question when someone does Romeo and Juliet, and the question is, why now? Gold has famously directed five of Shakespeare's great tragedies, and it seems that he's kind of working through something about Shakespeare in public in front of all of us.
So I wanted to understand why Romeo and Juliet, why now, and how he came up with this totally interesting, totally bonkers production. How does Sam Gold find his way into the middle of this mess? Like, what makes you decide to do Romeo and Juliet now?
It's funny that you framed the play in that way. I've always thought of Romeo and Juliet as a play about young people, but not necessarily as one for young people. There were so many, especially young women in the crowd that I went to. There was certainly, like, a sort of fan aspect of, like, we know these people. We're excited for them.
One sort of subtext of the play was Kit Conner's triceps are very prominently displayed all play along. But, you know, it just seemed to have this, like, very populist feeling where the people in the audience are being interacted with are— Offering their emotions, their sighs, their sort of exclamations. What was your theory of audience in making this show?
Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, and now Romeo and Juliet. And I... has this been a project for you? Because you've also done, you've worked on Ibsen, you've worked on other things. But has this Shakespeare sort of visitation for you? Do you conceive of it as one project?
Yes, sorry.
Does the makeup of that ensemble, who's in it, what kind of ideas and physicality and everything that they bring, is that something that develops in conjunction with that ensemble? Or do you... as a director, show up with a concept. I want to try this thing. Let's see how this works. How does the idea develop? The thing that makes, I don't know, your Macbeth different than other Macbeths?
We talked already about notions of sort of what is the popular or what is the sort of the broad audience. You mentioned earlier the Worcester Group, which is this downtown New York experimental avant-garde theater company. Another – I don't want to say benefit that they have, but – a particularity is the idea of a small audience that's coming for something that is self-consciously an experiment.
Yeah. And you working this stuff out on Broadway, which is a very different notion of what it means to be a director, a very different notion of audience, very different prerogatives. How does it feel to do all the things that you're talking about on Broadway, which is the broadest audience possible?
Just because they're not wearing the frills or whatever does not mean that you have therefore sort of desecrated the play.
that production was born in the mind of Ibsen. Exactly.
That's the director, Sam Gold, talking about the new Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet. We'll be right back in a moment.
I'm Vincent Cunningham, a staff writer here at The New Yorker, and I've been talking with the director, Sam Gold, about this latest new production of Romeo and Juliet. We'll continue our conversation now. Does staging something in the round change your whole conception visually as a director? I've always wondered, yeah.
People are increasingly engrossed in screens. Obviously, film precedes all the problems we think about with smartphones and everything, but what is the primary relationship between what you do and what shows up on screens in terms of TV and film?
You know, one thing that Shakespeare has in common with this is not something that I was ever primed to think about, that Shakespeare has in common with Quentin Tarantino is that they are both adept at using the stories of their time.
Showing 241–260 of 266 · page 13 of 14
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