Andrew R. Heinze

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Heinze's first professorship was at San Jose State University, where he taught United States History and won San Jose State University's Meritorious Performance and Professional Promise Award for 1988–1989. He later taught United States History at the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Berkeley before becoming a tenured full professor at the University of San Francisco, where he taught American history from 1994 to 2006. He won the University of San Francisco's Ignatian Faculty Service Award in 2003.

Heinze specialized in the history of race and immigration in the United States, the evolution of American consumer culture, and the interaction between psychology and religion in American history. He researched and taught extensively on both African-Americans and Jews in the United States, and he maintained strong interests in relations between Christianity and Judaism, religion and homosexuality, racism and antisemitism.

In 1997 Heinze, who was faculty adviser to USF's Jewish Student Union, was appointed to be the Mae and Benjamin Swig Chair in the Swig Judaic Studies Program and to direct the program. The Swig program was established in 1977 and is believed to have been the first such program established in a Catholic university. Heinze's first act as director was to invite Jan Karski, a man he had long admired, to speak at the program's upcoming 20th anniversary dinner. Karski, renowned for his active role in the Polish resistance movement in World War II, delivered the keynote address before an audience that included former secretary of state, George Shultz.

To solidify the Swig Program's academic standing, Heinze created a Jewish Studies Certificate program and expanded the curriculum beyond the theology department by introducing courses in Hebrew, Jewish history, The Holocaust, Jewish American literature, and Yiddish culture. Free public lectures and programs were made available to the general public, and in 1998 he created Ulpan San Francisco, an intense Israeli-style Hebrew immersion program that was scheduled during the summer and served anyone living in the San Francisco Bay area; it was the first such program to be offered there and is still a part of that community.

In 1998 Heinze inaugurated The Swig Annual Lecture Series (1998–2005) which brought distinguished scholars to the university; the lectures were presented free to the general public and were published and distributed to universities, public libraries, and individual scholars in the United States and abroad. Heinze hand-picked the topics as well as the participating lecturers, bringing public attention to a range of often controversial subjects that were of special interest to him. Two of the lectures garnered particularly strong public interest: one dealt with relations between Catholicism and Judaism (the speakers were Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, and renowned British rabbi, Rabbi Norman Solomon). The other lecture focused on homosexuality. Heinze had wanted to discover if there was a way "gay and lesbian Jews and Christians [might] find a more comfortable place within their faith-communities." (He had wanted to include Muslim speakers but was unable to find anyone.) The lecture was presented in the form of a symposium and was entitled "New Jewish and Christian Approaches to Homosexuality." Even in the liberal community of San Francisco, it sparked heated debate because established religion did not normally deal explicitly with the issue.

Theatrical career

In a 2005 interview, Heinze spoke of the creative frustration that led him to leave academia. "Even though I was doing a lot of academic writing," he said, "I had this ceaseless, nagging feeling that I wasn't fulfilling myself creatively... I finally took the plunge into a real fiction project... [and] it became clear to me that creative rather than scholarly writing was my real métier." He chose playwriting, in particular, because of Joe Orton; the intensity, intelligence and dark humor of Orton's plays had fascinated him. In 2006 he left his tenured full professorship at USF, moved to New York City, and embarked on a career in playwriting.

His first full-length play, Turtles All the Way Down, although unproduced, was praised by the Soho Theatre in London as "an accomplished first effort...sharp and highly enjoyable... very theatrical: fast moving with lots of humour." His next play, The Invention of the Living Room, started as a one-act play; it was produced in 2009 by HB Studio in Manhattan's West Village, and it had a second production at the Metropolitan Playhouse in the East Village. The play focused on a Lower East Side Jewish family, struggling in the aftermath of World War II. Heinze expanded it into a full-length version that won a place in the Harriet Lake Festival of New Plays at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater in 2011. In 2012 it was a Finalist for the Blue Ink Playwriting Award given by the American Blues Theater in Chicago, and in 2014 it won the Texas NonProfit Theatres' New Play Project, with a World Premiere at the Tyler Civic Theatre.

He wrote Hamilton, a tragedy about Alexander Hamilton, in 2012; it was a semi-finalist for the 2012 National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre and a Finalist for the T. Schreiber Studio’s 2012 New Works Festival. His dark comedy Please Lock Me Away was a Finalist at the Kitchen Dog Theater (Dallas) 2014 New Play competition. Moses, The Author, a comedy about the biblical Moses, "shows the 120-year-old lawgiver on his last day on earth as he races to finish the Torah" Heinze said the play "is a 'midrash' that imagines how Moses might have dealt with the series of crushing setbacks that faced him, from having a speech defect to being told that could not enter the Promised Land." Moses, The Author had a World Premiere at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2014, won a place in the Harriet Lake Festival of New Plays at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater (2014), and had an extended run at the SoHo Playhouse in Manhattan.

Heinze has written a number of one-act plays and believes the short-play format can teach a writer "the basics of dramatic structure." His short plays have been produced across the United States and have won numerous awards. In 2010 his one-act comedy, The FQ, won "Audience Favorite" at the New York City Fifteen-Minute Play Festival, and at the same festival, the following year, his short comedy, The Bar Mitzvah of Jesus Goldfarb, won "Judges' Choice" and "Audience Choice for Best Play." The FQ was published in The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2011, by Smith & Kraus. His one-act drama Masha: Conditions in the Holy Land won the Jury Prize for Best Script at the Fusion Theatre Company's 2012 Short Play Festival (Albuquerque, New Mexico), and in 2013 it was produced for the 38th Annual Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival in New York City.

Asked by Samuel French, Inc. if he could name the playwright who had most influenced him, Heinze said, "If I were darker, it would be Orton. If I were more laconic, it would be Pinter. If I were more lyrically erudite, it would be Stoppard. If I had ten additional brains, it would be Shakespeare. Hm. Everyone seems to be English. If I were more Irish, it would be Beckett. (And if I had more savoir faire, it would be Molière.)" He added, "I think all my sources of inspiration are unconventional. It's the feeling of something unconventional that makes me want to write the play. At least for a full-length play that’s true. I think I wouldn't want to invest the time if I didn’t have that feeling."

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