WHEN DEATH CRASHES A DINNER PARTY

A note from the
Dramaturg, Alexandra Azan

Secrets, Judgement, and Self: Inside When Death Crashes A Dinner Party 

The Rod Parker Fellowship is an incredible opportunity for students to have their original work fully produced by professionals and fellow artists at Emerson College. Established in 1991, the endowment honors Rod Parker, a WWII veteran who wrote his first play as an undergraduate at Emerson, and continues to support emerging student playwrights and their original work. 

Over the summer, I had the opportunity to work with Kat on her incredible script, When Death Crashes a Dinner Party. What emerged is a dark comedy that asks an uncomfortable question: if we are forced to confront buried secrets, without escape, who do we become?

Katarina Claire is the pen name of Kat Boskovic (‘27), an Interdisciplinary Studies major in Literary & Dramatic Fiction with minors in Philosophy and Publishing, originally from Storrs, Connecticut. Her academic focus reflects exactly how her mind works as a writer, blending narrative structure with philosophical inquiry. Kat told me she initially wanted to add “a philosophical spin on the classic murder mystery trope,” using purgatory and a “trial” to differentiate it from other whodunits. Instead, as she wrote, the play turned into an exploration of how people “claim moral authority while concealing their own compromises.” 

Inspired by No Exit, a play by 20th century French philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre, Boskivic was drawn to the idea that “Hell [is] other people” and wanted to write not about solving a crime, but about “how people judge each other, and particularly themselves.” Around the party, each character performs a role: the grieving widow, the devoted lover, the confident son, the ambitious scientist, the tortured poet. As Kat puts it, they are all “performed versions of themselves.” Trapped together, the characters’ certainty of their identities (widow, lover, coworker, son, peer) begins to erode, growing unstable as accusation turns inward.

While Sartre’s philosophy shaped the play’s exploration of judgement and identity, Boskovic also drew inspiration from the life and work of Czech-born writer, Franz Kafka. Specifically,  Kafka’s life shaped the character of Balthazar, an eccentric poet. Kat was struck by the fact that Kafka’s work went largely unread during his lifetime. She asked: “If art does not outlive us, was it still worth making?” Her answer is simple: “An absolute yes.” For her, “art is what makes us feel alive while we still are.” Many of Balthazar’s lines were drawn from her own journal like “little easter eggs” of her life embedded in the text.

Ultimately, Kat describes the play as an investigation into “how easily moral certainty can collapse.” What begins as a murder interrogation becomes something else entirely. As one line in the show declares it becomes “a purgatory of morality.” By the end, Heaven and Hell are offered as simple directions, but not everyone knows where they belong.When Death Crashes a Dinner Party invites us to laugh at the absurdity, and then to consider the roles we perform, the facades we maintain, and what might happen if we were forced to confront them.