What does it mean to fall in love knowing it will hurt? It's a question literature has been asking for centuries, and this spring, the 12th graders in Marriage Plot and RomComs found it being explored on Broadway.

The class, an advanced Upper School English course that explores how love stories are told and why they move us, attended a performance of Maybe Happy Ending, this season's six-time Tony Award winner, including Best Musical. The musical follows two retired robots navigating an unlikely romance and a profound question: is love worth the pain it almost certainly brings?

It's the kind of question the course was built around. All year, students have been examining love stories across forms, novels, films, and now theater, analyzing not just what these narratives say about romance, but what they reveal about us. Why do we seek out love stories? How do they operate on us? What do they tell us about what it means to be human?

Maybe Happy Ending offered a powerful new lens. By placing that timeless question inside a story about robots, beings not supposed to feel at all, the musical pushed students to think about what love stories do when they're working at their best: they make the abstract deeply personal.

It was also, in the truest sense, a Berkeley Carroll moment. New York City as a classroom. A Tony-winning stage as the site of serious intellectual inquiry. And a reminder that the questions at the heart of great literature aren't just on the page, they're alive, and being asked in bold new forms, right in our own backyard.