We’re waiting to see just what we are waiting for. Confused? So are the students in the high school’s fall production of Waiting for Godot, but the program note from opening night on Thursday is an example of what the students have come to embrace in what they all agree is the most challenging play they’ve ever performed.

“It’s really an experimental theatre piece and takes the theatre of the absurd to a completely different level of absurdity,” director Kate Murray said earlier this week during a break from rehearsals. “It is going to be confusing; it is not meant to be clear from beginning to end.”

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot tells the story of Vladimir and Estragon waiting for someone named Godot, and in his absence they meet Pozzo and his slave Lucky. Dancing, thinking out loud and, of course, absurdities ensue.

Ms. Murray describes the play as a workshop rather than a full production, and a combination of Waiting for Godot and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It was an evolution, she said, where everyone worked together to come up with a final product.

What originally started out as two separate casts (one female and one male) evolved into a large group after several original members dropped out, even though Mr. Beckett was insistent on an all-male cast.

“When we pulled them together, what was interesting was that they had a better grasp of the material,” she said. “It was almost like when they worked together they were getting more or something different out of it.”

As an ensemble, the cast decided to perform excerpts of the play and coupled it with an improvisational exercise called tagging out, where one cast member switches with the same character in the middle of a scene. To mark the transitions from one excerpt to another, the cast also came up with the idea to have “sneaky statues” during the fade-outs, posing in comical manners.

“It is not the full production, and we had to make decisions,” Ms. Murray reiterated. “That to me is also a really good theatre lesson. Sometimes things don’t go exactly the way you planned them and so you have to be flexible and adjust; what better lesson than to be a part of that decision-making. We sat down more than once and said, what are the issues, where do we go from here?”

But the process has been anything but easy. Waiting for Godot is the hardest material Ms. Murray has chosen for high school students, she said, and she’s picked difficult material in the past.

“It’s been really tough,” Ms. Murray said. “It’s not easy for them to connect to, it’s not easy for anyone to connect to, but it takes a very particular audience and reader to enjoy this material. It’s a real challenge, it’s very abstract.”

“Beckett reminds me a lot of Che-khov the truth is, Chekhov was writing about the absurdity of how we get in our own way as human beings,” Ms. Murray said of her interpretation of the play. “We have these mundane moments in life and we get in the way because we get so caught up in them.”

Ashley Gwynn plays one of the Vladimirs in the show and told Ms. Murray sometimes she has the feeling the play is real life and the rest of it is just a dream. “It was very interesting to me because she’s right,” Ms. Murray said. “We spend a lot of time not realizing how repetitive and mundane things are and how many things come back to us, and that’s what the show is and it makes it very hard to memorize.”

Ashley and her fellow players, however, are over the fact they may never fully understand what they’re performing; they are up to the task anyway.

“It’s been a challenge, and it’s totally different than anything I’ve ever done,” she said. “The way I made any sense of it was to read the play over and over and look at it as a story.”

When asked if they could relate to their characters, the entire cast said absolutely not. But Chris Pitt, who plays the second Vladimir, had an easier time relating to his character than others did.

“The thing about Vladimir that I most relate to is he has this crazy intelligent wit, which is just like my wit,” Chris said. “Except people here at this school don’t get it because they don’t understand that there could be such a thing as jokes that don’t have ‘your mom’ in it.”

“It’s been really difficult to try and get it,” Bryan MacKenty, who plays Pozzo, said.

“It’s one of the factors that makes the play difficult,” added Ashley.

“But it’s also one of the things that make it fun, because if you go through life accepting things you can already do and not challenging yourself, it’s nothing, it’s worthless,” Bryan said in response. “It’s been a really enlightening experience and there have been a lot of lessons learned.”

“All this aside, when you get up there it’s a total rush,” Ashley said.

Waiting for Godot opened last night and shows again tonight and tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Performing Arts Center at the regional high school. Tickets are $7, or $5 for students and seniors.