On why theatre class matters—and how it changes lives offscreen
When Stranger Things fans met Ms. Harris in season five, they were meeting more than just a new character in Hawkins. They were meeting Hope Hynes Love, the real-life high school drama teacher who helped show creators Matt and Ross Duffer survive high school, move to Los Angeles, and chase their dreams.
After the season dropped, the Duffer Brothers shared a heartfelt tribute on social media, crediting their former drama teacher with seeing something in them they didn’t yet see in themselves. For many theatre educators, it was a rare and powerful moment of public recognition for the impact they quietly make every day.
Behind that viral moment, though, is a 30-year career in the classroom. The Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) spoke with Hope about safe ensembles, boundaries, arts advocacy, and what it really means to teach high school theatre in 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Stranger Things is so much about misfits finding their people. How much of that spirit feels connected to the way you’ve built community in your theatre program?
Hope Hynes Love: Absolutely. I even wrote Matt and Ross after the first season. I said, “Tell your costume designer that the boys putting Eleven in tube socks, because they know girls wear socks like that but they’re not aware enough to know what kind they are, that’s how costuming can tell more of the story.”
But I also said, as a theatre teacher, the drama T-shirt hurt my heart. It is true that sometimes it is not cool to be a theatre kid—and it certainly wasn’t cool in the ’80s. I hope people are discovering how cool we are now.
I used to talk to my students about “safe ensembles.” I would say, we’re an ensemble; keep that high school baloney out of here. You have to deal with it eight hours of the day. For three hours, let’s just be people who want to tell stories together. That equalizes the playing field. You’re not a jock, you’re not a geek, you’re not whatever label. You’re just someone who wants to tell stories.
Now I talk about it as an equal working relationship. You come in, you get your instrument to neutral so you have that to offer, and then you offer that to everybody else. In this space, we have an equal working relationship—actors and technicians included. There’s no divide.
Being on set for Stranger Things, what felt surprisingly like running your school productions, and what felt totally different?
Hope: It’s absolutely a different modality. The acting itself wasn’t different, except for the calibration. I’ve been acting and thinking about acting for 30 years; I just had to get back up to speed on what it means to calibrate for camera instead of stage.
There’s a new vocabulary and a new etiquette. I was excited, as a teacher, to collect those things—this is a vocabulary word, this is an etiquette moment—so I could come back and walk students through that lens.
But in terms of values? It was the same. You come ready. You honor the story. You collaborate. Storytellers are storytellers are storytellers.
And having my former students as my directors was grand. When Matt was my student, he trusted me when I said, “You’re actually a pretty good actor.” He didn’t question it. So when they said, “No, Ms. Hynes, you’re fine. We’re going to give you this role. Come on, you’ll be great,” I trusted them. I wasn’t watching my own back. I let them do that for me. That trust really comes from watching young actors be brave for twenty years.
Why do you think theatre and arts education were so influential for the Duffers—and for so many of your students over the years?
Hope: I don’t teach theatre. I teach high school students how to be humans through theatre.
Theatre is the one subject that, if you cut all the others, I could still teach every subject through it. We’re doing ellipses when we hang lights; ERSs are math. Costume design is history. Theatre gives you an active excuse to be curious about a time and place that is not yours. If that’s not what we’re asking students to do everywhere in their education, we’re not preparing them for a century that’s going to be radically different from the one they’re in now.
And there’s metacognition—the ability to talk and think about what is happening as it’s happening. That makes you a better lawyer, doctor, scientist, and partner. Studies have shown that metacognition increases scores everywhere else.
The brothers have said you encouraged them to move to L.A. and pursue this path. How do you remember that moment?
Hope: I’m going to re-characterize that a bit. I had a habit at that time—when people said, “Do you think I could do this?”—of answering, “That’s not a question I can answer.”
If you think you can do this and you want to do this, tell me what your fears are. Tell me what you think you’re ready for. Tell me where you need to work and grow while we still have time together. But I will not answer, “Am I worthy?”
With the power structure in high school, me as the single arts teacher, the expert, the adult, it’s very dangerous for me to sit there and say, “Yes, you’re worthy” or “No, you’re not.” If you need me to answer that, you probably shouldn’t go.
When you know it for yourself and can answer it for yourself, that’s when you’re ready. I have always tried to put the power back to them.
What do you look for in your students or hope to help them discover when they step into your program for the first time?
Hope: Part of it is a philosophy of benevolent neglect. Whatever they can do, you let them do for themselves.
I can costume design a show more quickly than a student can. But if I have a student who can do it, I’m happy to build the production schedule to go as slowly as they need so they graduate with a portfolio that is their own. Anything students can do for themselves, we get out of the way and let them take leadership, then support them in that.
Over the past twenty years, I’ve also sharpened my ability to give feedback on works in progress that supports them and doesn’t take over. We use Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process as the way we talk about works in progress. It lets you give critical feedback without handing out answers, and that helps students own their voice while still being held to rigor.
Underneath all of that, I want them to leave with the capacity to be open and vulnerable when they choose to be. Most people are terrified that if they reach down inside themselves and pull something out honestly, everyone will be repulsed. In three decades, whenever a student truly lets their shoulders down and is open, what they pull out is always a gem. Every single one of us has that. I want them to know they have that, and to have practiced accessing it.
For Thespians who dream of a future in the arts—teaching, TV, or anything in between—what’s one piece of advice you hope they really hear?
Hope: Your grit and your executive functioning skills are the most important things.
Working at your craft and being ready to be used and usable is absolutely important. That’s the basic tool of a working actor. But everybody who’s “good enough” to work is doing that.
The people who make it are the ones who also have the financial piece in place, whatever that looks like. Maybe it’s, “I can live like a pauper.” Maybe it’s, “I have another way to make as much money as I can in as little time as possible so I can be available for art.” Maybe it’s making sacrifices and doing art periodically, and things you don’t love periodically.
And then it’s about relationships: are you reliable when you’re booked? Do you show up as a decent human? Your executive function and your reputation as a human—that’s it.
What would you say to a theatre teacher who’s exhausted, underfunded, and wondering if what they’re doing still matters?
Hope: I hear you, sister.
I think you need to make sure you are an artist who is stable and full before you mentor anyone else. I love my children, but I’ve joked for years that I will one day write a musical where a theatre teacher is sitting at a computer going, “Why is this internet so slow?” while a chorus of thousands sings on the sides. It will be a very niche market, but every theatre teacher in the world will say, “I feel seen.”
I’ve had to lay down boundaries. Once Upon a Mattress, which the Duffers were in, was the best high school musical experience I could have imagined. It was 2:00 a.m., the students had gone home, and I was 32, sitting in the theatre thinking, “This is as good as it’s going to get—and it’s not enough.” I knew I wanted children and I wasn’t dating because I didn’t have time.
So I started booking myself for Tuesday nights. Even if I had nothing to do, Tuesdays from 6:30 to 11:00 p.m. were my rehearsal time—for my life.
COVID was a wake-up call too. I was still working ten-hour days teaching remotely, but not twelve or fourteen. I had time with my child, right as he was becoming a teenager. I almost missed my child’s childhood. Never again.
During COVID, my students chose “people over art” as our class tenet. When we came back, that stayed our guiding value. If we’re not behaving like who we are and who we want to be, it’s time for a rethink.
Teenagers are insatiable. They will always need more. It’s exciting, but you need armor so it doesn’t eat you up. Teach your young artists how to say no, and model it.
At a time when arts funding feels so fragile, how do you explain to parents, administrators, or decision-makers why theatre matters?
Hope: Well, I’m a Greek girl in a Roman world. I think we get a lot of bread and circuses right now. What I love about theatre is that we need a way, as a society, to look at ourselves and collectively decide where we are and where we want to go. Theatre is the most engaging way to let a society do that.
Think about the playwrights in the ’80s. Nobody in certain circles cared who AIDS was killing until a really strong collaboration of gay playwrights made Manhattan socialites care—by bridging worlds through theatre. They made those women care about what was happening in the Village; those women went home and took action.
Connections between communities. Empathy between communities. Theatre is the immune system for democracy.
What’s your biggest personal takeaway from this whole experience—the thing you’ll carry into your classroom from here on out?
Hope: Personally, I’ve always been a fan of theatre work. I think if you’re a trained stage artist, it’s easier to calibrate for screen than the other way around. But you absolutely need to be able to do both.
What I’ve learned, especially having an agent these last couple of years, is that to stay afloat you have to be able to do it all. You have to be your own camera operator. You have to understand ethical social media interaction. You are managing “the business of you” as a product.
So I’ve started changing my teaching. When we do scene work now, students draw randomly whether they’re going to perform it for a proscenium configuration, a black box, or a camera. If it’s for camera, one person performs while the other feeds lines; then they trade. Sometimes they’ll do two modalities to see how it changes the scene.
I’m also teaching them how to read a rehearsal report from a stage manager and how to read a call sheet. The etiquette they need to understand has to be wider. If this experience has given me anything, it’s more concrete tools to give them.
And because we have to ask: if you were trapped in the Upside Down, what song would bring you back?
Hope: Stranger Things is set in 1987. I graduated in 1987.
My first lead in a high school musical was Hava in Fiddler on the Roof, and I gave it up because my mother got me tickets to see Prince and the Revolution on the Purple Rain tour for my sixteenth birthday. I said I would rather go to Purple Rain at Syracuse University than be in the musical.
So it would absolutely be Prince’s “Dance Music Sex Romance.” Early Prince. That, or anything by Aretha Franklin—maybe her Kennedy Center performance for Carole King. When I’m feeling blue about the world, I pull that up. That’s an artist fully embodied in her glory: open and vulnerable.
You’re back to planning your spring production. How are you grounding yourself in day-to-day teaching after such a surreal experience? Does anything feel different when you walk into rehearsal now?
Hope: The biggest difference is in how some students react to me in the hallways. Students who used to be prickly if I told them to go back to class are now like, “Oh, she told me to go back to class, I can tell somebody about that.” If that’s how I can use fandom? Rock on.
I think the idea that I’m any different than I was seven days before the season dropped is ridiculous. But if it means more kids aren’t mad at an adult when I shoo them back to class, I’ll take it.
There are also practical fruits. Cameo.com asked me to be talent, and all that money is going straight to the theatre department. If I can make a little side money that turns into, “Happy Christmas, here’s something for the program,” great.
And if being “the lady from Stranger Things” makes it easier for a kid to sign up for Theatre 1, or makes someone take me seriously when I talk about why the arts matter, I’ll use that. Those are the parts of fame that interest me. Fame itself? Within seven days I emailed Ross and said, “Is this what it’s like for you all the time?”
Fame is a cage, and I’m probably not very interested in it.
One More Spotlight
When asked what she wishes people would ask her, Hope doesn’t mention Netflix, fame, or working with the Duffers.
“Yes,” she said. “What’s a show that we’ve done this year that I want to give my students shoutouts for?”
This year, that show is Every Brilliant Thing. Her students had originally planned to do John Proctor Is the Villain, even workshopping it through Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process. But when they went to secure the rights in June, they learned the run had been extended and they’d have to wait until fall.
“So we’re like, ‘Well, guys, we don’t have it. What are we going to do?’” Hope said. After seeing Every Brilliant Thing, a one-person play about a young man who starts a list of every brilliant thing in the world to help his mother want to stay alive, her students chose it. “My students, first of all, chose that show.”
Auditions made the project even more unusual. “I had nine children who were ready to do it,” she says. Rather than turn eight of them away, they built an ensemble: they rehearsed it together, and each student took one performance night, rotating through the solo role.
“I think that’s something,” she said. “If I’m going to use my platform to send the ladder back down, I just want to let that group of students know what a remarkable thing they did and how very, very proud I am for that accomplishment.”
Over a 30-year career, it stands out. “It’s one of the things that will stay with me, both with that cast and with the process and product,” she said. “It was just what I hoped for.”
Even in the middle of a TV spotlight, Hope Hynes Love is still most focused on her students, the work they’re doing together, and the kind of school theatre that rarely makes headlines—but changes lives.
