TEENAGE WASTELAND Smoking grass = death. Drinking beer = death. Premarital sex = babies, then death. Ah, the joys of junior high assemblies and the scare tactics employed by slovenly gym teachers in short-shorts everywhere. Mark Dahl, co-director of the nonprofit arts organization Uncut Productions, remembers them well. And he had it worse than most of us — being openly gay in a Baptist academy and all. "I was raised in a conservative Christian family who told me that 'babies came from God,'" explains Dahl. "We didn't even address the topic of sex until I was in my late teens. Way too late — I thought girls got pregnant by French kissing." Watching his nieces and nephews hit puberty reminded Dahl how much things have changed and remained the same, from metal detectors in schools to the filtering of "facts" about drug abuse, sex and teen pregnancy. Adolescent angst and idiocy are projected onto the stage and screen during Assembly: Junior High, a guerrilla play Dahl wrote and directed. Over the course of two disorienting acts, a cast of five plays both students and their adult counterparts, each one representing a decade from the 1950s to the 1990s. As Dahl explains it, each character is fed a series of "misunderstandings and rumors" and "misinformation movies" culled from original and vintage educational propaganda films. To add to their confusion, everyone is eventually led to the principal's office after misbehaving at an emergency musical assembly. Dahl's been there before, too. "Flipping the bird, truancy, lateness, obscenities, smoking," he jokes. "Really cutting-edge kind of stuff."

Assembly: Junior High, Fri.-Sat., Oct. 7-8, 9 p.m.; Sun., Oct. 9, 7 p.m.; through Oct. 23, $8-$12, Christ Church, 20 N. American St., www.uncutproductions.org.