It sounds like a time-traveling episode of “Degrassi”: a group of 19th-century German teenagers sing their way through depression, suicide, incest, abuse and abandonment, to name just a few of their struggles. However, the dress and given date of “Spring Awakening” quickly stifle any further modern-day allusions.

“I think there’s a stigma attached to musicals, and this one is totally different,” Katie Greenberg, a freshman playing the naive and curious Wendla, said. “The songs are our chance to break out of the shell of the time period.”

Senior Ariel Saul, playing wandering and scarred Ilse, agreed: “If these people could express how they were feeling, this is the way they’d express it”—through sex and rock ’n’ roll. It’s a surprisingly inevitable combination of circumstance and art.

“It’s the only choice that could be, but when you see it, it still takes you by surprise,” Saul explained.

As in-person and YouTube audiences all over the world have learned following the show’s 2006 Broadway debut, “Spring Awakening” is the ultra-contemporary rock musical about the old-as-dirt issues that come with being young, powerless and ignorant. The characters communicate their angst through some singing and stress-relieving movement, each song a beautifully composed and modern head nod to the timeless struggle of growing up and figuring out who we are.

The young adult actors in the cast are all still in the midst of this troubling time, lending even more significance to their performance. “These issues don’t just happen at 13 and 14 and stop happening,” Anna Richards, a junior playing the show’s only adult female, explained.

When talking about their own characters, the members of the cast relate themselves back to the narrative, bringing up their own adolescent difficulties such as divorce, growing up in the Bible Belt and going through puberty well after all their other friends.

“We have a really diverse cast…and everyone is coming in with their own stories and lives,” Connor Duermit, a junior playing Melchior, said. Duermit related the ignorance of the teens in “Spring Awakening” to those he went to private school with: “Kids didn’t even know what stuff was.”

“The way youth deal with things now is not so different from the way youth dealt with them in the past,” Adam Cohen, a junior playing Moritz, added. He felt a lot of Washington University students can probably relate to each character’s struggle.

“Everyone at Wash. U. is trying to find their identity,” Cohen said. “My job as Moritz is to make them a little self-conscious about that.”

Saul and fellow senior Charles Morris, playing the adult male role, went through entirely different experiences growing up in much more aggressively liberal environments in which conservative attitudes would draw ire and even reactionary violence. While this is questionable improvement, the ultra-conservatism of the world of the play has not been eradicated, either.

“The characters we play, while they might be extreme, are happening somewhere,” Morris said.

That’s why the cast is hoping that Parents’ Weekend brings in large audiences of students and the people who raised them.

“Bring [your parents] to the play,” Duermit said. “It’s very important for them to see this, especially [students] that have younger brothers and sisters.”

Richards explained that the ignorant teens in the show needed this kind of knowledge and guidance to continue on with their lives. Perhaps ignorant teens who might be watching could use the same. Fortunately, knowledge is something Wash. U. students have in abundance; they also have the ability to share it with others, including their future children.

“We’re going to have wee babes of our own one day. It’s always good to reexamine…how you can effect change in your world today,” Saul said.

So the surprisingly inevitable effect of performing a play about trapped 19th-century teenagers in front of enlightened modern teens—who may have already been there and done that with regard to sexuality and depression—is helping people visit issues and topics that they may not consider all the time, according to Greenberg and the rest of the cast. That’s all that “Spring Awakening” asks for: acknowledgement of the audience’s knowledge and a pledge to keep that knowledge alive.

The show will play in Edison Theatre on Oct. 25-26 and Nov. 1-2 at 8 p.m. and on Oct. 27 and Nov. 3 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $10 for Wash. U. students and can be purchased at the box office.