Those interested in critical, feminist, and anti-racist pedagogy are on a search for means to counter dominant ways of speaking about stigmatized groups. Some see promise in popular theater, which starts from the experience of those on the margins. This ethnographic study followed 12 teen mothers, a highly stereotyped group, as they wrote and publicly performed a play about their lives. The playwrights wished to convey three messages: (1) they became pregnant for a variety of reasons, just like older women do; (2) they support a young woman's right to choose--including motherhood--based on individual circumstances; and (3) they believe that being a mother is a challenging yet positive experience. These messages, however, largely got diffused for several reasons: (1) the play's adult sponsors wanted it to encourage the prevention of teen pregnancy as much as to give voice to teen mothers; (2) given these dual purposes, the director tried to elicit warning stories from the play-builders; (3) the teen mothers found it difficult to forge one representative story from 12 evolving lives and difficult as well to challenge one stereotype without feeding into another; and (4) audience members, influenced by prevailing social attitudes, did not always interpret the play as the authors' intended. Nevertheless, practices like play-building hold educational promise if not oversold to students as an opportunity to fuse individual stories into one coherent statement capable of displacing opposing ideologies. The script writing phase, in particular, helped teen mothers articulate their concerns and collectively theorize about their experiences. (Author)