We all know that high schools, public or private, urban or rural, can be a more than a little messed up. And now that we’ve been through the gauntlet ourselves, we also lack the illlusion that our teachers were perfect, and now can see them more as the flawed human beings they inevitably are.

The Faculty Room, now being staged at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, takes things a step (well, maybe a few steps) farther with its exponentially unrealistic farce of teachers’ relationships with their students and with each other. Why have one kid bringing a gun to school when you can collect multiple guns off students every day, and dump them into a faculty-room receptacle? One teacher/student affair might be provacative or verboten: soon, it almost starts to feel like the normal order of things. Smoking pot in the teachers’ lounge is at first shocking; by the time we’re seeing teachers hopped up on E, we’re almost at the point of shrugging.

Clever one-liners abound in The Faculty Room: when history teacher Carver Durand (Michael Russotto) wonders why a fellow teacher has just emerged from the faculty room closet (this time, not a metaphor), English professor Adam Younger (Ethan T. Bowen) has a sardonic explanation for what’s behind its doors: “Narnia.” Prominently figured in the play are the “Left Behind” series of novels popular with Christian readers: this starts as a source for a couple of throw-away insults, and then plays a key role in the work’s literally apocalyptic conclusion, and it’s unclear whether the audience will be up for such a ride. The play has some problems (much of Younger’s dialogue is almost painfully self-aware, and some gags get dragged out way too long), but often it works, not as a light and fluffy satire, but as a biting, caustic vision of what these teachers’ lives could be.