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Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

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The Teachers' Lounge at Aviation High where the playwright, John Twomey, talks shop and fellow teachers Simi Nelson, left, Mark Terrence, Jerry Frohnhoefer and Lainey Gilbert gather.

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It was lunchtime in the teachers' lounge at Amsterdam High, and Wallace Johnson was complaining that he had not received the first paycheck of the school year, even though October was half gone.

Someone at the New York City Board of Education had entered Mr. Johnson's Social Security number incorrectly, he explained, and it was only after he appealed to five different administrators that the director of the Office of Salary Status finally resolved the matter.

"She told me that I'd passed away on the 30th of August and should contact the city pension system about collecting my death benefit," said Mr. Johnson, a rookie teacher.

Those words were spoken earlier this month not by a teacher but by a baby-faced actor on stage at a community theater in Queens. But if the dialogue and Kafkaesque runaround at the board sound all too real, it is because they emerged from the imagination and real-life experiences of a real teacher: John Twomey, who has been teaching English full time at Aviation High School in Long Island City for 10 years.

Mr. Twomey, 38, who studied screenwriting at New York University before turning to teaching to support himself, calls his play "Teachers' Lounge." And after limited engagements in a handful of small places – a production at the Laguna Playhouse in California drew "peals of laughter," according to The Los Angeles Times – "Teachers' Lounge" had its New York City premiere just over a week ago.

Though Mr. Twomey wrote his play in 1991, the seven teachers who inhabit his lounge, most of them crossing off the days until retirement, provide amplified voices for the innumerable frustrations of present-day teachers, in New York and elsewhere. Indeed, in an era when repairing public education is atop the agenda of both major presidential candidates, Mr. Twomey's play suggests that all roads to reform eventually lead through the teachers' lounge, and that the ride can be rocky.

In a perfect parable of the standards movement that is sweeping the country, Susan Wagner, a teacher who is gunning for the chairmanship of her department, greets her fictitious colleagues after summer vacation with a stack of binders. They contain detailed syllabuses that she has written for each teacher in the department.

"Who's going to follow them?" asks Marty Goldberg, a 30-year veteran who is surely among the system's most jaded.

"Everybody," Ms. Wagner says. "If you read the memo from Mr. Taft" – the school principal, who like the students, is never seen – "you'll find that you are required to strictly follow them."

As his colleagues begin tearing up the booklets, Mr. Goldberg cannot help himself: he sticks out his tongue at Ms. Wagner.

At another point in the play, Mr. Johnson, the doe-eyed rookie, tells his colleagues that he has decided to read "Huckleberry Finn" with his students, his voice filled with the enthusiasm of all those recruits lured to the system this summer by Chancellor Harold O. Levy.

"Huck Finn? With freshmen?" the crusty Mr. Goldberg says. "Some of the freshmen in this school are still on Dick and Jane."

When Mr. Johnson says he intends to use the Thanksgiving break to polish the lesson, Mr. Goldberg is dismissive.

"Look Wallace, I know your intentions are good, but don't waste your vacation time," he says. "The kids aren't worth the effort. They don't appreciate it."

For Mr. Twomey, who grew up in Flushing and graduated from Francis Lewis High School in Fresh Meadows, having "Teachers' Lounge" playing in his home borough has been sweet. The two-act play is being performed next weekend at the Trinity Lutheran Church in Middle Village, whose gymnasium has been outfitted with 84 folding aluminum chairs.

Though the theater, operated by a community group called Beari Productions, is far from Broadway, Mr. Twomey hopes that the run will propel him closer to 42nd Street. Mr. Twomey, who is single, has written two other plays: "Ball and Chain," a comedy about an anxious groom-to- be, which was produced off Off Broadway last year, and "All the City Lights," a drama about a police officer's brush with death.

Mr. Twomey, who has struggled with burnout himself and took a six- month sabbatical several years ago, says his primary aim in "Teachers' Lounge" is not to expose life inside a school, though he concedes that "there is truth about education" in his play.

"I was more interested in writing about seven different people being forced to interact with each other," he said.

Though similarities exist between the teachers' lounge at Aviation High and its stage version – the broken coffee machine, the walls painted shades of orange and pink, the chairs on their last legs – Mr. Twomey, his face as unlined as Mr. Johnson's, does not share his characters' sharp cynicism.

Well, maybe he is a little cynical. Like the fictional Mr. Goldberg, Mr. Twomey was disappointed this year that the Rosh Hashana holy days fell on a Saturday and Sunday, which meant that no school days were lost. ("Figures," Mr. Goldberg says in the play. "I'm Jewish and I can't even enjoy it.") And Mr. Twomey, like another of his characters, was counting the minutes until jury duty a few years ago, only to see his plans for a paid vacation dashed.

"On the first day of testimony, the plaintiff collapsed and they canceled the case," Mr. Twomey said. "I was back in class the next day."

Still, few of the teachers in "Teachers' Lounge" would attempt what Mr. Twomey did in school the other day. He read "Macbeth" with his English as a second language class, a class in which there were a dozen students from nearly a dozen foreign countries, including the Dominican Republic, Poland, Peru and China.

To the delight of Mr. Twomey, who could pass for a sibling of the actor Hugh Grant, most of the students were getting it, with a little prodding.

When Banquo says, "Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?" the students were initially puzzled by the phrase "insane root."

Mr. Twomey tried to help. "Someone in the cafeteria tells you something crazy," he told his students. "What might you say to that?"

"Are you smoking something?" one student shouted out.

Mr. Twomey smiled.

To find inspiration for his own play, Mr. Twomey did not have to travel far. The teachers' lounge at Aviation, a vocational-technical school that specializes in training airline mechanics, is across the hall from his third-floor classroom.

Mr. Twomey is famous among his colleagues for using napkins to jot down what he overhears. But in the real-life lounge one day last week, the discussions were not especially pungent, though the Mamet-like dialogue was typical of an average teacher's day.

"What time do you have?" asked Joe Bianco, 55, an English and drama teacher for the last 11 years.

"About five minutes left," answered Victoria Clark, also in her 50's, who has worked at Aviation more than half her life.

"What time?" Mr. Bianco insisted.

"I've got 12:35," Ms. Clark responded.

"I've got 12:40," Mr. Bianco said. "There's something wrong with this watch."

Later, Mr. Bianco asked: "What period are we going into?"

Though neither Mr. Twomey nor his colleagues have ever been declared dead by the Board of Education, Mr. Twomey remembers several teachers, long since retired, expressing racially insensitive statements about students and their capabilities – comments that sound like those occasionally uttered by Mr. Goldberg in the play.

Mr. Twomey remembers one teacher wheeling a cart with a VCR down a crowded hallway and shouting, "My wife blames the decline of New York City on the rise of the Hispanic population."

The line was originally in the play, but Mr. Twomey eventually cut it. "It sounds so forced," he said.

Mr. Twomey also remembers a teacher who was on a campaign to improve the department, not unlike the character Ms. Wagner, and who once tried to strike a colleague whom she considered lazy. (In a bit of inspired casting, the character of Ms. Wagner is played by Mr. Twomey's sister, Claire, 36, a onetime hospital administrator who is in her first year as an elementary-school teacher, under Chancellor Levy's Teaching Fellows program.)

The character of Nora O'Reilly, who is in her 40's and is perhaps the most passionate teacher in the play, is based at least in part on Ms. Clark.

While the fictional Ms. O'Reilly wears a scarlet "A" as she teaches "The Crucible," the real Ms. Clark has had her students imagine the characters of "Othello" as if they were rival romantic suitors at a modern-day high school.

Still, Ms. Clark has never gone quite as far as Ms. O'Reilly did in the play. When teaching "A Streetcar Named Desire," Ms. O'Reilly later tells her colleagues, her breast inadvertently slipped from her blouse as she tried to mimic Blanche DuBois's seductiveness.

That may be far-fetched, but at intermission of the last performance, Victoria Gleicher, a teacher for 30 years at Public School 69 in Jackson Heights, sought out Mr. Twomey to tell him that watching the play had been like looking at a mirror.

"I started out as that young Wallace Johnson," she told him. "These words are coming back."