What people are saying about Muntu...

“Natalie offered us a solo piece of reflections and personal anecdote, a sort of biography/confessional tied to trees - - both real ones and trees as allegories for human experience. She lifted lightly into describing the progression of her own feelings about her bicultural origins, about rootedness and the appeal of relocation, travel, and finding one’s rightful place. This was a light, eloquent flight of fancy, artfully and delicately accompanied on cello and percussion.”

- Theatre Critic Michael Meigs


“Natalie’s work is substantive and far-reaching in its implications. Through art, Natalie captures the kinds of intellectual, spiritual, and cognitive dilemmas that young people who are marginal to society face. These struggles further track back to policies and practices that encourage youth to 'shed' themselves of their ethnic and community-based languages and identities. Her work is a far cry from 'art for art’s sake,' but rather consciously aims to engage audiences, encourage reflection, and promote empathy for the challenges that so many face. Indeed, this work models the notion that art equates to a public good when it connects with the realities of the community. Like the best, most ennobling task of the social scientist, it promotes public responsibility by holding up a mirror that allows its recipients to imagine new, emancipatory possibilities for their lives. I cannot say enough about this work.”

- Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., Cissy McDaniel Parker Fellow


“Based on my own viewing and reading of Natalie Goodnow’s Muntu, the play represents a serious piece of work by a young Latina who tackles, from a deeply personal angle, an issue capital to Latinos--those whose parents or grandparents have immigrated from Latin America, and those descendents of settlers preceding the first Anglos. Ms. Goodnow’s Muntu, deals with gentrification. She does so, moreover, in a way that invites thoughtful participation from the audience, and a freshness which, while owing something to youth and exuberance, manages to convey much wisdom and depth of vision notwithstanding. One feels that Ms. Goodnow understands theater as a instrument used to impart not only pleasure and enjoyment, but also human aspects and vistas, and in Muntu she delves well under the surface in order to weigh diverse, competing perspectives. I wholeheartedly recommend this forward-looking, up-and-coming young playwright.”

- Spanish Professor and Theatre Critic Charles Rand