Articles by: Christopher Munden

Christopher Munden is a writer and editor who has worked for many leading Philadelphia cultural institutions and businesses. He is an avid theatergoer and the editor/publisher of the Philly Fiction book series (phillyfiction.com), collections of short stories written by local writers and set in Philadelphia.

“Forget all the laws of optics, which the legend does not recognize” —Anton Chekhov, The Black Monk Attempting to summarize the best modernist short stories is futile; it’s impossible to capture the depth and subtleties that make the stories great. The endings aren’t tidy; their meanings are opaque. THE BLACK [...]

Passenger: It’s madness — what sort of an age do we live in? You don’t feel safe anywhere now, only at home… First Passenger: At home? Passenger: Only at home now. First Passenger:. You hold on to your convictions. Violence and fear sure get a lot of press these days, [...]

As a lover of theater, beer, and meat-filled pastries, I’ve been excited by the ads and positive buzz about this series from Tiny Dynamite for a few months. When I finally got the chance to catch a show at the Society Hill Playhouse, the first of their new season, it [...]

Since 2004, Inis Nua Theatre Company has been entertaining Philadelphia audiences with provocative new Irish and British plays, staged at venues around the city. The company has already marked a solid place on the city’s cultural landscape: last season’s Dublin By Lamplight was one of the years most acclaimed productions, [...]

We’ve all met someone like her: the beautiful ex–prom queen with a cutting wit, overconfidence, and the forgivable tendency to say something hopelessly stupid and insensitive. In Leslye Headland’s BACHELORETTE, now in a hilarious Luna Theater Company production at the Adrienne Skybox, that person is Katie (Kate Brennan). Katie is [...]

UN VIAJE: A CHRISTMAS JOURNEY is not the ideal theater show for a childless thirty-something, which I am, but the kids on opening night certainly loved it. More Christmas variety show than plot-based play, the disjointed narrative is interrupted for holiday singalongs and ends in a joyous chaos of music [...]

“What happens to a person when they live in a world where you can’t believe anything and the things you don’t want to believe are actually true?” On October 2, 2006, a man entered an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, killing five young girls and wounding [...]

“It’s yours, you created it, you gave birth to it. Don’t throw it away because you’re frightened of the implications.” Zelda (Janis Dardaris), an award-winning evolutionary biologist, is telling Rachel (Victoria Frings), a young woman at the beginning of her career in the field, to take ownership of her potentially [...]

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY bookends with characters quoting T. S. Elliot’s “The Hollow Men.” “Life is very long,” begins Beverly Weston (David Howey), the alcoholic patriarch of an Oklahoma household, talking to the young American Indian woman (Elena Aroaz) he’s hired to take care of the family home and its drug-addicted [...]

“Meditation and water are wedded forever” —Herman Melville, Moby Dick For last year’s Live Arts Festival, playwright Thaddeus Phillips took us on a trip to Columbia into the heart of a telenovela soap opera. He returns to the country in this year’s WHaLE OPTICS, but this is just one of [...]

More than any other historical figure and his followers, Hitler and the Nazis are shorthand for evil. Few people emerge from the close contact with the Austrian-German dictator and his diabolical band of thugs with even a shred of good reputation intact. This is what makes Leni Riefenstahl, the title [...]

There are some 400 million native English-language speakers in the world and about 6 million of them live on the island of Ireland, but the Emerald Isle seems to have produced much more than its share of great writers and playwrights. This season saw six companies collaborate in a Philadelphia [...]

The Royal Wedding and the death of international terrorist Osama bin Laden were the two leading news stories this past weekend. Funnily enough, royalty and terrorism find a vaudevilian intersection in Inis Nua’s ambitious latest production, the American premier of DUBLIN BY LAMPLIGHT, now onstage at the Broad Street Ministries. [...]

As SPEAKING IN TONGUES opens, two couples are about to cheat on their partners. Their dialog develops in unison; each pairing uttering the same lines. Sonia/Jane: Tell me about your wife… Peter/Leon: Why? Sonia/Jane: Is she happy?… Peter: Yes Leon: Maybe Peter/Leon: I don’t know. Why do you want to [...]

There are many voices in this nation’s health care debate, and Anna Deveare Smith could probably act out them all. In LET ME DOWN EASY, now onstage at Philadelphia Theatre Company’s Suzanne Roberts Theatre, she portrays twenty eclectic individuals, from sportspeople to supermodels, politicians to doctors, as they share their [...]

In the mid-1990s one of my favorite albums was a dark post-hip hop LP by British artist, Tricky, titled “Pre-Millennium Tension.” In retrospect, the title captures the zeitgeist in the years running up to “Y2K”: a fear that a carefree age might soon be destroyed. This anxiety is also evidenced [...]

Like many people, I was introduced to THE CRUCIBLE in a high school English class. The teacher dutifully told us that it was a play about McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee. But it’s not. Though deeply allegorical, Arthur Miller’s classic is “about” the Salem witch trials of the [...]