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When Amy Kass turns the observation into a general question--"By the way, do you all believe that love at first sight is possible?"--there's nervous laughter. From the back row, a woman asks for clarification: "Does she love him before or after he wins the wrestling match?"

Leon Kass ticks off several of Rosalind's opening comments to and about Orlando, proposing that "she has an interest in him maybe even from the start."

"Strong eye contact sounds like something between you and your ophthalmologist. What about love as desire?" Leon Kass, SB'58, MD'62

"Is there love at first sight?" the woman repeats. "I don't really think so. Certainly…." As her sentence trails off, the room lapses into silence.

"The floor's open," Leon Kass says firmly.

"I believe in love at first sight--in hindsight," offers a curly-haired guy in a black V-neck sweater. "If it's not love, I'm not sure whatit is. There's certainly strong eye contact."

"Strong eye contact sounds like something between you and your ophthalmologist," Leon Kass replies. "What about love as desire?"

The student holds his ground. "What you have later on is much larger. What I'm saying is, when it first starts out, it's as attention, focus, a pouring out of the heart."

"I don't believe in love at first sight for teenagers," says a no-nonsense guy in a dark-plaid shirt. "Maybe," a woman concedes, "but she's so ready for any of these things to happen. If I were to pick one word to describe her, it would be 'giddy.' If he'd been called away, she would have fallen in love with somebody else."

Amy Kass nods. "She's ready, she's ripe. If you ever remember yourself on the cusp of womanhood, when all of your senses are alive and the world is beginning to come alive…. It's not an accident that we have that locution, 'to fall in love.' It's not something you can control."

Rosalind "wants to fall in love," Kass continues, "but she also wants to marry." When she and Orlando, both having been forced into exile, meet in the forest of Arden, Rosalind is masquerading as a youth to aid her escape. She quickly decides not to reveal her identity to Orlando, even though he has papered the forest with lovesick verse. In deciding "to play the knave with him," the class agrees, she's testing Orlando. As Leon Kass sums up, "She's not just giddy, she's also smart. She's protecting herself in some way from too rapid revelation of her own feelings."

A promise has been broken. On the face of it, minimally, you're owed an explanation. Why? Leon Kass, SB'58, MD'62

Rosalind greets Orlando by asking him the time--an odd question in the forest, but "the perfect question," Amy Kass says, to ask a lovelorn youth. "She wants to bring him down to earth, bring him back into time." Before they part, Rosalind sets a specific time for their next meeting. "A person who keeps time is reliable, responsible," Kass continues as a student's watch beeps the hour.

Orlando arrives late. "How do you feel if someone is late?" Amy Kass asks. "It's lowering in a way," one woman admits. Meanwhile the student who's reading Orlando seems perfectly typecast: "It's good to be 20 minutes late. It makes it more intense."

Degrees of lateness get discussed: how late, how good the excuse, how well you know the person who's late. "I give people the benefit of the doubt," a black-haired woman announces. "They show up--that was the point of the meeting."

"A promise has been broken," Leon Kass notes. "On the face of it, minimally, you're owed an explanation. Why?"

"Because a promise has been broken," the woman responds, not yet convinced it's a promise that matters. If Orlando had known he was meeting Rosalind--not some rustic youth--offers the pragmatic student in plaid, he would have been on time. Across the table, a woman disallows the point: Rosalind is testing Orlando to find out how he'll treat "the Rosalind he'll be married to 20 years down the road, the one he's not infatuated with anymore."

With the class running short on time, Amy Kass calls for the next scene, where Rosalind leads Orlando through a mock marriage and its aftermath, including the spectre of adultery. Full of puns and word play, the scene can seem silly, Kass says, but it has a serious purpose: "What is she trying to find out?"

"She's witty in both senses of the word," offers the student who plays Celia. "She's trying to find out something about either his wit or how he will deal with hers."

"She's gotten him to the mock marriage," Leon Kass agrees, pulling together punctuality and adultery. "Immediately after, she makes him think: All right, now that you've possessed her--now what? A woman who's really in command--can you manage that? A man who isn't ardent in the pursuit of the beloved might wind up there in time to find the beloved someplace else. So, get a watch." --M.R.Y.