Did Hungarian Theatre Kids Just Change the World?

Theatre kids, you may have heard, are the new “snowflakes,” at least according to the radical right-wing haters who, sadly, have no better epithet to smear the likes of New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani or any liberal/progressive who’s ever taken an improv class or performed in a high school musical. These despised theatre beings, the slur implies, favor the performance of emotion over substance. They lack authenticity, feign sincerity, and, in their humiliating desperation to fit in with regular folks, are just plain cringey. All Glee, no grit. The haters have used that brush to tar a wide range of Democratic politicians and other loathed “libs.”. Of course, the tarring stains us, too, at least those who, like me, are lifelong theatre kids.

But maybe these same theatre kids have just shown the world their power. Just maybe they are the ones that lit the flame that set a thousand torches ablaze, and maybe those torches set off thousands more, starting a nationwide conflagration that, almost impossibly, burned down the House of Orbán, ousting the authoritarian prime minister who for sixteen years exerted near absolute power over all of Hungarian life. On Sunday 12 April, as you probably know, nearly 80 percent of registered Hungarian voters turned out and elected a two-thirds Parliamentary majority for the opposition, ending Viktor Orbán’s entrenched reign. Whether they provided an early spark or merely added fuel to a low-burning fire, I have little doubt that it was theatre students, their film studies counterparts (aka theatre kids with better toys), and their adult theatre kid teachers at the University of Theater and Film Arts (SZFE) in Budapest who helped make it happen.

It doesn’t take a mathlete to calculate the cost of Orbán’s last sixteen years. Elected in 2010 after four earlier years as prime minister and eight as obstructionist member of parliament, he reassumed office with a two-thirds supermajority in the parliament and a full-throttle shift to the authoritarian right. He rewrote the country’s fundamental laws (its constitution), took nearly complete control of all national media, and remade the nation through a system of cronyism and corruption that brought staggering power and riches to himself and his chums. Orbán managed the rare feat of projecting dictatorial invincibility behind a façade of democracy, exerting near total dominance with little use of military or constabulary force. All of this made him a hero of American ultraconservatives, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and capitalist pirates. Orbán was, as Steve Bannon famously said, “Trump before Trump.”

This story is about just one part of the Hungarian “illiberal” blueprint our current administration has followed: the attack on higher education. The Trump administration’s legal and extortionist assault on universities has been shocking. These attempts to dismantle a nation’s higher education system and bend it to the will of an authoritarian government draw inspiration from Orbán’s radical overhaul of Hungary’s public universities. Orbán’s Fidesz party used the cover of relentless, systematic attacks on “woke ideology” and alleged LGBTQ+ “indoctrination” to seize hold of the schools. His government’s so-called “model change,” a euphemism for “privatization” and “takeover,” has been a stupefying success. It has eradicated all university autonomy, determined what gets taught and by whom, and effectively transferred the assets of public universities into private, loyalist hands.

Of all the universities in that country, only one fought back. Guess which one… (You win!)

Beginning in 2020, this hostile takeover provoked mass protests from the students, faculty, and administration at the University of Theater and Film Arts (SZFE), sparking a movement that, while small, changed the course of lives and was heard around the world. After Kafkaesque attempts at negotiation and Bleak House-style legal battles, SZFE’s administrative leaders, followed by over half the faculty, resigned. Together, students and teachers created the Learning Republic, a community-based educational program to continue training amidst their David-and-Goliath struggle. Rather than admit the new, wildly antagonistic, government-appointed leadership, the students launched a blockade of university buildings and a brilliant repertoire of daily, performative demonstrations and ritualized actions, replete with sharable and often viral visual design elements—the kind of playful, exuberant, and super-catchy public protests whose spirited influence can currently be felt in our own “No Kings” rallies.

There’s every reason to believe that these daily activities, which lasted seventy-one days before being shut down by a second COVID wave, roused a sleepy, depressed, even hopeless populace. Certainly their street actions set the scene for a rising tide of protest that peaked in the “illegal” Pride parades throughout Hungary in 2025 and excited the courage, participation, and widespread resistance that surged on 12 April to win. But, as that unstoppable theatre kid Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote in Hamilton, “Oceans rise; Empires fall.”

László Upor, my friend and colleague for many years, was SZFE’s rector (equivalent to our college president) in 2020 when the attacks of the school—dubbed a “liberal reptile hatchery” in one of the many government-run media outlets—hit full force. A preeminent dramaturg and translator of more than fifty English-language plays into Hungarian, László had served on the school’s faculty for decades before being appointed vice rector and, later, elected rector by the university Senate, though the rubber stamp authorization of his new position was held in limbo by the ministry in charge of education for an unprecedented period of time during the forced model change. His personal history of these events, Almost Impossible: How a Small Hungarian Arts University Faced Down a Hostile Government Takeover, came out in Hungarian in 2024. It’s the inside story of a relentless baptism by fire in an almost impossible era. It’s also a book about education—in the classroom, rehearsal room, film studio, courts, halls of government, and, most joyfully, in the streets. It’s about learning to win without victory and lose without surrender, the exaltation of fighting the power in concert with your peers, and the heartbreak of hitting that wall of power again and again, a heartbreak that, as theatre kid George Bernard Shaw put it so pithily, is “only life educating you.”

That November, three days after our presidential election, I reached out to László to get his story translated and into American hands. Starting immediately. I hadn’t read the book—like most of the world, I don’t speak Hungarian—but I knew I needed it. With Trump following in Orbán’s second-time-around footsteps I needed it for me—to understand what was coming, what could be done to stall if not stop the impending wreckage. More, I needed something to do, something within my own wheelhouse to feel less helpless against the onslaught that, sure as shooting, came fast and furious. Together, we’ve spent the past eighteen months translating it for readers in the United States, and although László’s wry, passionate, and at times almost surreal account is a tale mainly of defeat against almost impossibly stacked odds, the dramaturgy of that story, along with its outcome, changed this April.

László, his colleagues, and the students who ultimately led their former teachers and university leaders—theatre kids all—played against type and, by playing, brought tens of thousands of citizens into the streets at their side and drew support from such international figures as Wole Soyinka, Cate Blanchett, Salman Rushdie, Ian McKellan, Ariane Mnouchkine, and the late Peter Brook and Robert Wilson. They defied their detractor’s expectation that, as Trumper Jack Posobiec posted on X, “Theater kids always crumble if you actually press them.” (Strange coming from a conspiracy theorist who beats the drum for a guy with the nickname TACO, for “always chickens out.”) What were the guiding, implicit principles of that defiance? Those theatre kids in the lead on the streets weren’t just putting on a show, though they exploited everything they knew about performance, including glee; they were showing they could give as good as they got. By leaning into their own learning, they fought for their futures and that of a democracy in peril.

When proselytizing the power of theatre, we true believers usually start with empathy. Theatre trains us, we often argue, to see ourselves in others and identify with people and characters who are, by definition, not us. I hold empathy in high regard, even as the conservative warrior elite pooh-poohs it, but let’s table that one. If theatre really taught empathy, 2,500 years of Western drama might have made us into a different kind of people altogether.

Let’s start instead with performance itself, the force of which even the derogatory name-slingers can’t deny. You don’t make the leap from reality TV star to president if you can’t put on a show. (Acting like a tough guy, for instance, or a devout Christian, or as if you care about protecting freedom of speech on campuses.) But theatre kids understand some deep things about performance in everyday life: the tangled fusion of reason and passion, how dramatic conflict arises not merely from opposing ideas but from irreconcilable differences of desire. They study motivation, the personal “I want” song of every character to tread the boards, and so they know that spoken lines are means to attain the things characters want. Words are actions, whether or not they’re true. And because thespian children study subtext, they pay attention to the unsaid, aware that it speaks volumes.

Also, theatre kids are steeped in a literature rife with treachery, where conspiracy isn’t merely theory. Weaned on centuries of satire, they know a hypocrite when they see one. They employ masks and can tell the difference between bravado and bravery; they know that armor is just a costume like any other, even when worn by a furious child masquerading as, say, secretary of defense. If we drama types sometimes love our own high emotions a little too well, as opposed to politicians who spout lies to enflame fear and hatred in others, I forgive us.

Most important to László Upor’s intimate narrative, maybe, is that theatre kids know how to think on their feet (improv!) and what it means to put their bodies on the line, take the stage, speak, and be heard. They know the exhilaration of self-expression, just as they know the glory of voices rising up together. Their work is play, and in order to do that work, they have to know how to play together, how to collaborate in the creation of a world—both the world of the text and the one in the rehearsal room. They know in their bones that struggle is an embodied practice and a way to practice groupness. Yes, theatre students have a lot to teach us. A few bullet points:

1. Work for justice in good faith; don’t expect it in return.
   
   This one’s pretty obvious. The faculty and students of SZFE, even when they disagreed, had to keep the faith with each other and keep their eyes focused well ahead. They practiced grassroots organizing in a painstakingly elaborate and democratic forum called “The Forum,” whose torturous sessions—often several times a day—brought new meaning to the term “durational.” They received, in return, no concessions to their demands—until just weeks ago, five-and-a-half years later. 
    
2. Use your unique talents, whatever they are.
   
   Also obvious: performance, design, film, writing, dramaturgy, song—this resistance movement drew from the skills of its participants, masterfully creating events from a torch-bearing honor guard on the roof above their theatre to a six-mile human chain comprising fifteen thousand citizens separated, per health protocols, by four-foot strips of red and white caution tape—the lengths of which were then flown from balconies, bicycles, show windows across the country and continent as a sign of solidarity. Even their more-than-daily press conferences were theatre. And the filmmakers captured it all— 1,200 hours on camera.
    
3. Build community everywhere. Then keep building it.
   
   Examples abound, but you’ll have to read the book (due out in the fall).
    
4. Build coalitions across disciplines, generations, borders.
   
   Most majestically, László and his colleagues created a consortium of five arts academies throughout central Europe, as part of an “emergency exit” (EmEx) plan to graduate the protesting students, more than half of whom left the original school. Under EmEx, students could study with their old faculty in Budapest and receive their diplomas from partner schools elsewhere in Europe. At the same time, former SZFE faculty and students established Freeszfe, which offers training through a series of programs. Freeszfe survives to this day, though with no degrees issued.
    
5. Welcome and celebrate allies, including unexpected ones.
   
   Sometimes even the on-site police joined in the singing, or parliament guards offered tips to help with protest art projects.
    
6. Give back to others in need with the same spirit of support you receive. Pay it forward.
   
   Students also provided support or resources to frontline health workers, struggling community agencies, and churches under governmental attack. They offered free classes to neighbors put out by their round-the-clock occupation and fed those in need with overflow food donated by their own supporters.
    
7. Nurture mirth and find joyful expression, even in protest.
   
   Never allowing themselves to play the part of victims, the students reveled in spectacle, costume, and song. If someone needed to deliver documents to the halls of justice, let the goddess Justitia do it! If you light a torch in Budapest one evening, how about sending runners on an Olympic-style relay to carry the fire of freedom to universities in far corners of the country? And everywhere… let’s sing.
    
8. History is a never-ending work in progress, so think and work in long arcs of time.
   
   …Five-and-a-half years later, on the twelfth of April, that final, thrilling concession!
    
9. Leave your mark.
   
   It may be as small as a handprint on a university wall, a “cave of hands,” as hushed as a silent farewell ceremony in the constant rain, or as ephemeral as the echo of a Beethoven overture you played to the street from an upper floor classroom on the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, but let it be known that you were here.
   
   And maybe one more, from deep in the heart of every theatre kid ever:
    
10. Play on!
    
    There’s no moral to the story of the theatre kids of Hungary, but there’s inspiration. There are lessons, too, specifically the way even bit players—e.g. theatre and film kids and their teachers and administrators—working in community can make historic change. If you were skeptical on 11 April, maybe you’re convinced now. We can’t know what the future holds for their country or ours, but we know they made their mark, these theatre kids, young and old. They were here.