In an age where cultural expression and civic responsibility often travel on separate paths, Gregory Fabian has built a career that unites both. A member of the Bar in the State of New York and an independent international human rights consultant based in Bratislava, Slovakia, Fabian brings together the precision of law and the emotional reach of theatre. His story traces a remarkable journey-from the American stage to the heart of post-Communist Europe, where questions of democracy, justice, and human dignity continue to evolve.
Our virtual conversation with Fabian offered an intimate view into how his artistic and legal lives intersect. As a dual citizen of the United States and Slovakia, he has served with organizations such as the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and the OSCE Missions in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina before founding his own human rights consultancy in Bratislava in 2009. After law school and before moving to Europe, he worked as a corporate real estate lawyer in the Wall Street headquarters of two transnational financial services firms. Yet, beyond his policy work, Fabian remains deeply connected to the theatre, using performance as a medium for dialogue and social change.
In this interview, Fabian reflects on how Slovakia became both a home and a creative laboratory; how acting shaped his human rights advocacy; and how the performing arts can help societies confront authoritarian tendencies and rediscover empathy. Excerpts:
You have often spoken about how Slovakia became both your home and the place where your artistic identity took shape. How did living there influence your sense of self as an actor and a global citizen?
First of all, my work as an actor actually began in the United States. All my actor training, my Bachelor of Arts in Theatre, and my Master’s in Fine Arts in Acting were completed there. Until I came to Slovakia, I had not done any acting for about thirty-four years.
When I arrived in Slovakia, I saw an English-speaking theatre group and told the director about my background. I said, “If I can help in any way, please let me know.” Two weeks later, they called and asked me to take the lead in a show. That was my first time on stage in thirty-four years.
Being in Slovakia required me to adjust my craft for audiences whose second or third language was English. I had to adapt my performance for clarity and understanding. My human rights work also began here, soon after the Velvet Revolution, during the Mečiar regime. I worked with a local NGO and later became a consultant to the Slovak Helsinki Committee through their umbrella organization in Vienna.
It also influenced my work as an actor. One of the things that flows through my work as an actor is theater for social change. I’m trained as a professional actor; I’m trained to act, sing, to dance. You’re trained to be able to do all those things in order to get work. But I always had a particular feeling for plays that had a social change message – plays that contributed to commenting on the human condition and so on.
One memorable experience was performing in a play written during the 1970s, when censorship in Czechoslovakia was still in crackdown after the Prague Spring. He had to write a play that had meaning to it and criticized totalitarianism without being very overt about it because of the censorship at the time.
Acting also complements my legal work. The communication and empathy skills I learned on stage help me convey human rights principles to people who might not otherwise understand them.
Living in Europe opened my eyes to how different societies function. The civil law system here differs entirely from the common law I was trained in. I also learned that not everyone approaches problems with the American tendency toward rigid organization and speed. Working in Kosovo and Bosnia taught me the value of listening, patience, and respect for cultural differences.
In short, being in Slovakia has shaped me both professionally and personally. I really found some place like John Denver has the song title; he said, “Going home to a place you’d never been before.” When I got into human rights, it was a revelation to me. I never looked back, and I continue to do it.
Your repertoire spans from Off-Broadway in New York to leading roles on the European stage. Which role challenged you the most in an international setting, and why?
I think a play “Slučka pre dvoch” in Slovak, which means “A Loop for Two.” It was a three-character play about a man who lives in his attic for five years. His wife lives downstairs in their house. He lives there because he’s afraid of the secret police. Interestingly, the matter that he’s afraid of has just evaporated; the politics have changed. It’s not a problem, but he’s convinced the secret police are after him. So, his wife lives downstairs, and she’s having to work two jobs to support them. She’s getting really tired of that after about four or five years. She takes a young lover downstairs, which is very interesting. They’re carrying on downstairs, and his wife usually goes to see him at least once a week to bring him food and for their conjugal visits and such.
That play was particularly interesting to me because, first of all, it’s the best thing I’d had an opportunity to do since I was acting in New York. Second of all, it was a tragicomedy. It was built as almost an absurd comedy, but the deep subtext was a criticism of how totalitarianism puts fear in people’s lives that they can’t escape; a certain paranoia and such.
I should mention that all of my grandparents, by the way, were born in Slovakia, and they immigrated to the States in the immigration waves at the beginning of the twentieth century. I still have relatives here on both sides of the family. Some of the relatives—neither side of the family became members of the Communist Party. So, when they had children who did well in school, the children couldn’t go to university because they weren’t members of the party and such. My former girlfriend that I came with to Slovakia, her family suffered tremendously during the socialist years, again, because they were not members of the party.
All these things provided a tremendous emotional memory bank and motivation to do this role. It was pretty difficult because it was a kind of a comedy, but there were serious scenes where he had monologues where he’s really on the edge of having a mental breakdown, if you will. Using the knowledge of the events that had such an effect on people’s lives here was very meaningful.
When I say leading roles, these were not large plays. They were kind of the equivalent of Off-Off-Broadway in New York, if you will. And they were for an English-speaking audience. So, there weren’t so many Slovaks unless they spoke English as a second language. I would say the audiences were half Slovak and half international people as well.
Having worked in both American and European theatre, what differences in performance traditions and audience expectations have stood out to you most?
I noticed in Slovakia, audiences are very reserved. They’re not really forthcoming. When you’re an actor, you really depend on the audience feedback. In other words, whether they’re quiet or not, whether you really have their attention- you can feel it, you know. Your focus is on stage, but you can feel when the audience is with you or not. In Slovakia, it’s sometimes hard to get that connection, and it’s a little different. Audiences aren’t as forthcoming, perhaps until the end for curtain calls and such, when they are.
Secondly, I’m doing plays in English. As I mentioned, English is the second or third language for a lot of people. So, I have to adjust my craft and speak very carefully and really speak slow enough that people understand. If I start speaking very quickly sometimes, I lose the audience. Hence, you have to adjust technically a bit for an international audience. I think that’s the main thing: the technical adjustments that you have to do and the expectations you have of feedback from the audience.
You have built a career that extends beyond acting into law, education, and human rights advocacy. How has your international life helped connect these fields?
Oh, well, as I mentioned, I joke that Slovakia is where I figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up. The reason being that I was 45 years old when I moved here. I’d been a corporate lawyer in New York and worked as a professional actor, but it was in Slovakia that I discovered how those two identities could merge through human rights work.
Again, it’s just the combination. Human rights brought all my former education and experience together in one. The communication skills as an actor came together with my legal skills, and I was able to combine them both into a body of law that I really believed in with my whole heart and soul.
Reconnecting with your Slovak roots shaped not only your personal life but also your professional outlook. How has that experience deepened your perspective on culture and identity in a global context?
Slovakia is a member of the European Union. It’s a small country. It is sometimes very provincial, and yet it’s a member of the European Union as well. I’m pleased to be both a Slovak and an American citizen. So
I am very pleased to live in Europe, where the commitment to human rights is embedded in the European Union’s legal framework and upheld by institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights. It plays a vital role in shaping and regulating society across member states. This environment changed me profoundly, as I came to value and admire Europe’s human rights culture-something that contrasts with the United States, where constitutional law is often regarded as standing above international law
There’s much more of an ingrained human rights culture in Europe, I think particularly because they’ve been through so much with wars and so much history for hundreds of thousands of years. Whereas America is such a young country, we don’t really realize.
Also, my roots. It was very interesting because when I came to Slovakia, I got in touch with how my parents raised me. I never realized it because all four of my grandparents were Slovak. I never realized the way they raised me, the values they instilled in me, the foods they cooked, the cultural aspects. I never realized where they came from. You know, we Americans are kind of really young culturally. But when I came to Slovakia and visited for the first time, it all came into perspective for me where I’m from. It was very, very touching.
I saw the way that, for example, my relatives in the East, they had a large garden, and the first time I visited, they still had outdoor outhouses, outdoor toilets and such. Now, of course, it’s much more modernized. But I understood my own roots and where I was from. It was an extremely important experience for me. That was in 1986. It was the first time I visited relatives with my father in Czechoslovakia. So, that shaped me as well.
Performing before diverse audiences, from the United States to Central Europe, requires adapting to different cultural expectations. How has this shaped the way you approach a role?
It doesn’t in the sense of how I go about studying a role or character. It only possibly has an influence, as I mentioned before, on how I perform technically: slower, more deliberately, understanding that this is an audience for people for whom English is the second, third, or fourth language. But my approach to a role doesn’t change as an actor.
It still involves -you know, Spencer Tracy, the famous American actor, was asked for his advice to young actors. He said, “Learn your lines.” That sounds very simple, but there’s so much wisdom in that. Learning your lines means going over and over and over them until you understand exactly what your character wants to or needs to say in every line. And then understanding what the other characters are doing as well, knowing their lines almost as well as yours.
Then there’s also doing the research behind the play, perhaps from a historical perspective. When I did this play in Slovakia, I looked a little into how things were for dissidents in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s after the Prague Spring and the crackdown of the Warsaw Pact invasion. This was called the Normalization period during the 1970s where everything became very tightly constricted and regulated. Hence,I looked at things like that.
Also, sometimes I had to rewrite lines a little bit because the translation of the Slovak script maybe wasn’t so good. You maybe add a little bit more of something with the permission of the director. Again, the approach is the same as far as how I analyze a role, but it’s the technical aspect of playing it that I adjust a little bit.
You often speak on democracy, human rights, and cultural diplomacy. How do you see the performing arts playing a role in strengthening dialogue across borders?
I can answer that by a theater project that I was involved in here. The Milan Šimečka Foundation here, a very prominent human rights NGO, had a project called “Theater of the Oppressed Forum Theater.” The concept was originally from a Brazilian playwright named Augusto Boal. He developed this theater that was theater for social change.
What he did is he took a group of people together, worked with them for three or four days; sometimes they were actors, sometimes non-actors. They started doing theater games. He molded them as a group. In the meantime, they developed a short play about one of the members of the group who had experienced some extreme form of discrimination, for example. The people told stories. They had to tell stories about when they felt discriminated against, and we went around and around until we heard one that was compelling. Then we developed a short, maybe ten-minute, fifteen-minute play about what happened to this person.
Then we’d perform it for the audience. We’d tell the audience, “Look, this is participatory.” We’re going to do the play, and we’re going to welcome you for your comments. “What could you do as a person in a situation like this to alleviate the discrimination, to address it, to challenge it, and so on?” We even invited people to come up on stage and take one of the roles and step in. It was fascinating to see some of the different ways that people had in dealing with the discrimination in constructive ways. The theater project focused on nonviolence, a peaceful way of trying to resolve the conflict. That was very fascinating to me because it got people involved in looking at theater from a perspective of theater for social change, not just as entertainment, but really addressing real issues in society. This Brazilian playwright developed this because he wanted people to be more involved in society and dealing with discrimination and such.
I think that’s one thing. With regards to democracy, it’s a difficult thing that globally everyone talks about democracy. But if you had people name five characteristics of a democracy, most people couldn’t. I had to teach what democracy meant when I was in Kosovo and working with a new government, working with civil servants and such. I really had to show them how they can carry out their authority either in an authoritarian sense or in a human rights sense.
So, from the perspective of democracy, and also human rights and the rule of law, combining these and trying to help people understand what they mean in a practical sense is what I might call applied human rights. In other words, it’s helping people who aren’t human rights experts, who know nothing about human rights, to understand what human rights are and why they are important in their everyday lives.
I gravitate towards situations like this. For example, I teach at the Comenius University Medical Faculty, the medical school here. I have a seminar I do on “Health and Human Rights.” It’s a four-hour seminar for fourth-year international medical students, and it focuses on them. First of all, I have to do about an hour on what human rights are, basically the international framework and so on. But then we get into practical problems written by doctors for doctors that focus not on medical practice problems, but on the fact that the root cause of the patient’s condition could, in fact, be a human rights situation.
For example, a woman walks into the emergency room. She’s four months pregnant or five months pregnant, and she has a cut over her eye and a contusion under her eye. It’s 3:00 in the morning. Her husband’s with her. He’s a big guy. He smells of alcohol. He’s behaving aggressively. You get the wife aside and you ask her what happened. She says, “I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and I ran into a door.”
I look at the students. I say, “What, if any, human rights issues do you see here?” Finally, someone says, “Maybe it’s domestic violence.” Yes, maybe it is. “And what’s your role in that? What should you be doing about that?” And some say, “That’s not my job. I’m not law enforcement. I’m not social protection.” That’s true. It’s not your job. But the problem is that many times in many hospitals throughout the world, some places have a protocol of what doctors are supposed to do when they see evidence of such things. In other hospitals, there’s no procedure at all. Legally, they might not have to do anything except treat the injury.
I try to convey to them that you really have to do something more than just treat the injury. Because this woman will come back three, four, or five times. The fifth time, she could be dead with a subdural hematoma or something because nobody did anything to make sure that law enforcement and social protection knew about this and should have been investigating.
This is a practical example of an applied application of human rights to show that, for example, you don’t discriminate on the basis of social status when you’re deciding who to treat in a busy emergency room when you’ve got people all over the place. And you’ve got a guy from a drug rehabilitation center who has classic abdominal symptoms, classic appendicitis symptoms. And you decide he’s from a drug rehabilitation center, you go to work with other patients, and you delay treating him because you think he’s probably just having drug withdrawal symptoms, when in fact he’s having acute appendicitis. And his appendix ruptures because the doctor made a decision based on status to go and talk to other people. In other words, his status is from a drug rehabilitation center.
The other thing, I really enjoy working with the students in this. I’ve been doing it for like fifteen years, but we have about 16 different problems we do similar to this. I divide the students up and put them into groups. I ask them, “What’s the human rights or ethical issue, first of all? Second of all, what small step could you do to address it?” You know, you won’t resolve it, but to address it. Because these are often systemic problems. You can’t change the fact that there’s not a law that governs what doctors are supposed to do when they see evidence of domestic violence, for example, although there should be. But in the meantime, what can you do? How can you make sure that social protection and/or law enforcement knows about this?
I think my work really is an applied human rights approach. It’s to help the ordinary person understand what human rights mean in their ordinary life, and how important they are.
That reminds me of a conversation I was having at the doctor’s office recently. I was telling them, “When somebody is 18, and they’ve had sex because they were raped, you know, you’re not asking questions.” And they said, “No, that’s none of our business.” I said, “But that’s against the law. That person was raped.” Yeah. And they don’t want to get involved with that.
It really depends upon what the local, ethical, and more important, legal standards are for doctors when they have information like that—what they’re supposed to do. It can vary widely from country to country. When I worked in Bosnia, it was very interesting because when the international community sort of entered into Bosnia and there was the Dayton Peace Accord and such, a whole flock of us internationals came in and tried to help them establish human rights laws on things like how you deal with domestic violence, how medical staff deals with domestic violence. There was actually a pretty good law that was passed in the parliament of what doctors specifically were supposed to do whenever they saw any sort of evidence on an investigation -how they were supposed to report it. We did some research to see how it was actually working. We found out that a lot of the doctors weren’t doing it. They just weren’t applying it, you know. And it wasn’t being enforced. So, it’s one thing to make a law, but it’s another thing to actually have it be implemented.
I tell the students, “Look, you might not have a legal obligation to say or do anything about this, to report this, but I would argue, don’t you think you have a moral and ethical obligation to do something here other than just treat the injuries?” Because of what can happen, actually. So, I think laws like this are very important. But unfortunately, it can be very uneven from country to country, city to city, city versus countryside, that kind of thing.
Looking forward, how do you envision weaving together your work as actor, lawyer, and educator into projects with international reach?
I think one of the things I mentioned is Theater of the Oppressed Forum Theater. I’m trying to advance that a bit. What they do is you’re together with a group of people for five days, and they can be—we had people from different countries. We had different languages going around, which was interesting. We’re trying to build a theater group in five days with three different languages going around.
I would encourage theater for social change in particular. Also, I think that if we would do more plays which would address, for example, the situation that’s going on in the United States now, and to help people understand how authoritarianism—how to identify it, what it means. You have a tremendous amount of the American population who just can’t believe and can’t accept that anything like authoritarianism could be happening in the United States, when in fact, the onset of authoritarianism is really becoming more and more apparent. I think more plays and more kinds of theater, film, television, whatever, to highlight what authoritarianism is and what it looks like, what its characteristics are, what its indicators are, and so on. I think we desperately need this in the United States. As a human rights lawyer, I’m extremely concerned about what’s going on in the United States right now.
I think we need somehow, rather—we haven’t done it since the Declaration of Human Rights – but we need to find globally some way of integrating human rights education into primary and secondary education. I ask my medical students. I have them in groups of 20 for this seminar I do. I always start by saying, “Have any of you ever had any informal or formal education or training on human rights, what it means, where they come from, and such?” And everybody says no. I say, “Well, don’t feel badly. This is typical. This is one of the problems in human rights – that we don’t have any background on it.” I tell them, “After an hour of my lecture on human rights, you’re going to know more about human rights than probably 80% or 90% of the world’s population: that they come from international human rights agreements, that they’re treaty-based laws, that they’re actually human rights laws that countries voluntarily and legally commit themselves to in the interest of everyone in the country.”
Then, for example, how a human right can be restricted, when it can be restricted, what the conditions for restricting it are. First of all, I ask them, “Can human rights ever be restricted?” And some of them say, “Well, no.” “Why?” “So, what about, for example, if somebody is in prison, lawfully convicted of a crime, and their freedom of movement is restricted? Is that legal?” “Well, yeah, it is.” Okay. Well, yes, they can be restricted under very specific conditions.
“What is discrimination?” People don’t have a clue globally as to what discrimination means. It’s not just treating somebody less favorably. It’s treating somebody less favorably when there is no legitimate aim for the different treatment. Sometimes governments have to treat people differently, but there can be legitimate reasons why. Or, even if there’s a legitimate aim, is the means used to achieve that aim proportionate to achieving that aim?
I emphasize this is other thing, I really like to, because I’ve worked a lot in discrimination law, explain to the ordinary person what this really mean in effect. Also, diversity, equity, and inclusion – what it really means. It’s not about giving someone a job who’s less qualified. It’s about, amongst all qualified candidates, you’re going to give someone a particular, extra factor in the hiring process based upon the fact that they’re from an underrepresented group. It can be women. It can be ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities. It could be people with disabilities and such. So, it’s not about, you know, just how it’s being characterized so often now—about less qualified people getting a job and such. We have so much to do, I think, to educate the public.
Unfortunately, though, those of us in the human rights community, we talk to ourselves. We don’t talk to the outside community enough as well. I think that’s the main thing. I’ve dedicated my work to helping the ordinary person understand what human rights mean in the context of their own lives and the lives of their family and how – and I saw human rights violated, the results of human rights violations, here in Slovakia when I came. I really started to get the feel of it because I was here only four or five years after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989. Then in 1993, they had what they called the Velvet Divorce where Czechia and Slovakia split. I really got a feeling of how communism affected people’s lives and even working under an authoritarian government during the Mečiar years here.
I always tell people that discrimination is the root cause of conflict. Therefore, peace and security and stability for us all are directly related to how each of us treats people who are different from us and how we recognize the dignity and the worth of every human person. That’s my credo.
