Directing

Fermat’s Last Theater Company produced its original adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial June 23-July 2, 2016 at UW-Madison's Fredric March Play Circle Theater.

Adapting a classic work of fiction presents a specific set of problems, which are only magnified by the fact that The Trial has been successfully adapted in the past by auteur directors—such as Orson Welles’ 1962 film adaptation and Steven Berkoff’s stage adaptation  (1973/1991). Of course, Kafka is an important influence on "absurdist" theatre, particularly in the work of Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, and his countryman Vaclav Havel. The play was adapted by Alex Hancock with additional contributions coming from the director and actors. One of Hancock's most innovative conceits is to elevate the women in the novel to a chorus of narrators. This move allows the women to give voice to Kafka's narration and K's inner thoughts. It also ameliorates the novel's sexism and creates an ironic tension between the narration and Josef K's viewpoint. Setting the play in the 1950s United States brought the play closer to the present, while maintaining an uncanny distance. The setting, along with the jazz soundtrack, added elements of the film noir.

Jeff Casey directed the play using a collaborative and improvisational rehearsal process, where the actors had an active role in shaping the production. The Left Field Trio, a jazz ensemble, wrote and performed original music for the play—which complemented the improvisational nature of rehearsal. The band and the actors improvised together throughout rehearsal in a subtle give and take that sometimes reshaped entire scenes. 

Faithful to the novel and the absurdist tradition, Fermat's production swung between slapstick comedy and nightmarish terror. However, The Trial is in a way a morality tale. (Indeed, this production was influenced in part by the National Theatre's recent adaptation of Everyman.) It is the story of an unremarkable everyman faced with the judgement of a Court he does not recognize. A central tension we explored within the play was Josef K's ambiguous guilt/innocence. K is certainly guilty—guilty of indifference, complacency, pride, and complicity with injustice, but K is not prosecuted for his actual guilt. He dies because he refuses to submit to the Court system. K is, despite himself, a hero because he ultimately refuses to play along with the Court's farcical and corrupt procedures.

The performance was accompanied by numerous public event that included a range of speakers. One event at the Arts + Literature Laboratory included a discussion of Kafka's oeuvre and legacy with UW-Madison faculty members Hans Adler and Ralph Grunewald. Other events aimed to broaden the discussion of the play to address a host of contemporary issues in American criminal justice. For example, an interview on WORT radio (with the director Jeff Casey, Professor Greg Wiercioch, Kate Judson from the Wisconsin Innocence Project, and Gilman Halsted, long time criminal justice reporter for Wisconsin Public Radio) discussed the relevance of the play to current issues such as mass incarceration.

This production was made possible in part by generous grants from the Madison Community Foundation, the Madison Arts Commission, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and Fermat's donors.

During Prof. Casey's first semester as Theatre Director at Norwich, Pegasus Players produced two plays by Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter. Party Time takes place at a posh cocktail party as a military crackdown takes place on the streets outside. The New World Order is about a prisoner who is undergoing torture. Pegasus Players' production cast actors across the two plays, effectively bridging the two plays and their common subject matter, authoritarianism. As Norwich's new theatre space was still under construction, the play was performed in one of the campus gallery spaces.

George Brant's play Elephant's Graveyard was produced by the Antagonists Theatre Company, a short-lived collective founded by Jeff Casey, Annelise Dickinson, Tim Hamilton, and Sandy Peterson to promote contemporary and new plays. Antagonists' production of Elephant's Graveyard ran February 3-5, 2011 in the Hemsley Theatre at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was directed by Annelise Dickinson with Jeff Casey as assistant director.

Elephant's Graveyard is based on the gripping true story of Mary, the giant circus elephant owned and loved by Sparks Circus, who was convicted of murder and hanged in Tennessee in 1916. Brant's dialogue is remarkably evocative, and the production was staged with minimal setting to emphasize the incantatory power of script as interpreted by the exceptional cast. The production was funded by a generous grant from the Arts Institute and the Department of Theatre & Drama.