By SHARON EBERSON
The headline read “Orlando theater creator Jeremy Seghers joins the exodus of artists out of Florida.”
That was in June of 2023. Almost two years to the day, Seghers is set to make his theatermaking debut as a Pittsburgher.
The Jacksonville, Florida, native came north, leaving a legacy of classic theater pieces reimagined as immersive, site-specific experiences, including Equus in a barn and Dracula in an “Edwardian fetish club (in the back of an oddities shop).”
For his directorial debut in his new home, Seghers is going somewhat more traditional, staging Franz Kafka’s The Trial, as adapted by Nick Gill, in the Rauh Theater, the black box in the basement of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning.
“I love the Rauh because it’s underground – I mean literally, in a basement. And I think that that’s a great place to do Kafka,” says Seghers, who in his day job oversees front of house and box office for Pitt Stages and PItt’s Department of Music performances.
Seghers, an award winning, independent theater producer and director, had spent time in Chicago and New York before returning to Florida to be near his ailing father and family, but the seeds of his migration to Pittsburgh were sown earlier, when he was earning a BFA in Media and Performing Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Members of the faculty who initiated that program had come from Pittsburgh, and while there, he met his closest friend, a Pittsburgh native now living in Johnstown.
“There was always something kind of appealing about Pittsburgh, that it had a very strong sense of culture and identity, and a mix of cultures, which, in Florida, anywhere other than Miami, doesn’t really have any authentic culture of its own,” Seghers says, adding, “Nobody moves to Florida for the arts. They moved there for the theme parks.”
Deciding to “uproot and relocate,” he sold his one-bedroom condo and bought a three-bedroom house in the South Hills.
Seghers has been buoyed by observing the work of Quantum Theatre as a site-specific company, as well as independently produced performances, such as Witch at Carnegie Stage. He met one of the cast members for The Trial, Matt Henderson, by attending Henderson’s Spotlight: Monthly LGBTQ+ Theatre Jam Sessions.
The timing was right to bring his brand of theatermaking to the Pittsburgh scene, and he began looking at stage adaptations of The Trial after seeing Orson Welles’ 1962 film adaptation.
It has been said that Kafka, the Czech writer best known for The Metamorphosis, had written The Trial as a reaction to the bureaucratic systems of the turn of the 20th century. He understood paper-pushing well, having earned his living as a lawyer within the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute in the Austro-Hungarian empire.
The protagonist of The Trial – a dystopian tale in its day – is a banker called Joseph K., who on his 30th birthday is suddenly arrested by men from an unknown agency, for an unidentified crime, and made to suffer through surreal trials, without ever knowing why.
Rather than a tale about bureaucracy, playwright Gill has said, “It’s not a parable, like 1984, it’s not a criticism of existing or potential terrifying social structure. In this interpretation, it’s more … a study of a bloke than it is a study of the state as a structure. It’s kind of the story of an existential midlife crisis.”
“I liked [Gill’s] take on it,” Seghers said. “I liked that he really leaned into the absurdity of it, and left a lot of openings. There aren’t a ton of stage directions, which I love, having most recently worked on A Streetcar Named Desire, which has like a gazillion stage directions. I thought, ‘Oh, this … gives me room to play.’”
For Streetcar, his final local production in Florida, Seghers worked with his friend and collaborator Indigo Leigh, the transgender actress and designer who played Blanche DuBois.
The novel of The Trial was published posthumously, 100 years ago. Kafka, who died in 1924 at the age of 40, had told his friend and literary agent, Max Brod to destroy all his unfinished works, but Brod instead took Kafka’s writings and molded them into the book.
The story has since been reworked in numerous adaptations, including the Welles’ film starring Anthony Perkins. Light and sound will play big roles in setting the mood for Seghers’ production, inspired by the movie and the cinematic German expressionism of the 1920s.
While the play feels “very prescient” – in the way 1984 and A Handmaid’s Tale are seeming less and less dystopian these days – Seghers was also inspired by the deeper exploration of “repressions of desires” in Gill’s adaptation.
“There was always something kind of appealing about Pittsburgh, that it had a very strong sense of culture and identity. – Jeremy Seghers
Seghers notes that one of the choices made by Max Brod, when he initially published Kafka’s diaries “was Kafka’s same-sex interest in men, which were there and were edited out, but have since been restored. … So what the play does, it hints that maybe if we’ve got Joseph K. as the proxy for Franz K., maybe there’s something there that we weren’t told about Kafka.”
Kafka’s several affairs with women were well-known, through diaries and letters that Brod made public, “but [these other desires] have only since been kind of revealed in new versions,” Seghers said.
The director is just getting to know locally based actors, and found his Joseph K. when he saw the actor Sam Lander in the Prime Stage production of Great Expectations.
“It is essentially what the character of Joseph K. does – he doesn’t leave the stage. … So I met with him. He talked about Crime and Punishment, and he already was familiar with Kafka. I said, ‘OK, you’re a smart person. You’re a talented person. I can work with you.’ ”
As someone who doesn’t like auditions, Seghers says he prefers to get to know his cast, which he refers to as his collaborators. He begins his days with the message, “Good morning comrades,” to The Trial’s team.
Seghers revealed that when he came to Pittsburgh, he arrived without a job and just a feeling that Pittsburgh was his kind of town.
“And so far,” he says, “it has been absolutely worth it.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
The Trial is at the Richard E. Rauh Studio Theatre, the Cathedral of Learning, 4200 5th Avenue, of the Oakland campus of the University of Pittsburgh, June 26-29, 2025. Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-trial-by-franz-kafka-tickets-1320082866389
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