Meet Christopher Krovatin: Fighting the Good Fight Against Boredom

Tiperary Explores Horror Movie Tropes in an Original Context 

In just fifteen pages, Christopher Krovatin's play Tiperary touches on kink negotiation, suspension of disbelief, the fetishization of virginity, and sexualized violence against women in the horror genre. Artistic Director Chelsea Holland chose this play to direct for the Best of Fresh Blood festival, and the first performance is Thursday, July 17 at 7:00pm.

The play centers on Nick and Diana, a married couple, who are attempting to navigate the intersection of sex and violence as they role-play a slasher-movie fantasy scenario. And, just as some horror movies (or plays) can be inadvertently hilarious when things go wrong, Diana's sexual fantasy is continually interrupted by hilarious failures. It seems reality just can't compete with the idealized scene the couple is trying, at times desperately, to create. We interviewed playwright Christopher Krovatin to ask him about his inspiration for the play, his greatest fears, and the challenges of writing horror.

The scenario that Diana describes is fairly specific, but it also hints at some familiar horror movie genre tropes. Early slasher movies established the convention - now more of a cliché than a rule - that if someone has sex in a horror movie, they'll be dead by the credits. Only the virginal female (the "Final Girl") has any hope of escaping the killer. Diana's fantasy casts her as the virginal female, and her husband as a hungry-for-revenge murderer. The specific motive she gives the killer is actually rather similar to Mrs. Voorhees' motive in the original Friday the 13th. By exploring horror movie tropes and exploiting audience expectations, Christopher Krovatin has created a thoroughly original, thought-provoking, and frequently hysterical play.

See Tiperary by Christopher Krovatin for yourself - along with four other terrifying plays at The Best of Fresh Blood, July 17-19 at Stage Left Studio.

-- Claire Fishman

The Best of Fresh Blood 2014

LA PETITE MORGUE is proud to announce our selections for The Best of Fresh Blood 2014! We have received over 270 submissions, and since the Fresh Blood reading series began in August 2012, we have shared over FIFTY short horror plays with our audience. Every playwright who has had their work read at Fresh Blood should be proud of their work. Narrowing down our choices was very difficult, but we are pleased to be producing the following works of horror this July:

The next step is to recruit some fearless directors - so, if you know any masochists with God complexes, please, send them our way - and once we have built our team, we will be announce our audition dates!

In the meantime, don't forget to join us on Wednesday, May 7 - in your best blood-splattered formal wear! - for A Night to Dismember: The Fresh Blood PROM, at 8pm at The Dressing Room in lower Manhattan.