Biography: I am a psychologist, oral historian, and playwright/actor, now emeritus at the University of Michigan.  I have been interviewing/deep schmoozing with Holocaust survivors since the 1970s in multiple meetings with the same survivors over months, years, and—with some survivors—decades.  This is obviously a different practice than “collecting” single “testimonies,” and yields a range of different outcomes.  That work is most fully summarized in On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony as well as in a book co-authored with Agi Rubin, Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated.

My plays include REMNANTS, Death/Play, or the Mad Jester of the Warsaw Ghetto, The Spike, and The Stall, an Allegory about Fascism and Cruelty.  REMNANTS has been produced for radio on NPR and staged online and at more than 300 theater venues worldwide.   For more particulars, see www.henrygreenspan.com

At this point in my work/life, I am more committed to process than product: that is, developing contexts and collectives devoted to working and “learning together,” as my survivor friend and co-author Agi Rubin put it.  Thus, while I continue to write essays and new plays, performance is only the middle of three steps: the first being the creative collaboration that precedes performance, the last being discussions that follow.  All three are non-negotiable conditions for any work I do.

Other contexts include groups like this network.  I am involved in similar international collectives—a workshop on interview interpretation, a group of colleagues whose work is also grounded in multiple interviews rather than single “testimonies,” a group of other artists (mainly in theatre, graphic novels, other visual arts, poetry, and sculpture) who aim to enhance and contest reigning paradigms and practices in work concerning the Holocaust and other hells.

Behind these various initiatives is the conviction that such collective and collaborative practice is itself not much supported in academic “business as usual”—which incentivizes the monograph and the lone scholar being CV-defined “productive,” while generally dissing work that draws deeply on living relationships,  sustained “learning together,” emotion, and imagination.   But if we really don’t work like we are in it together, we are screwed indeed.