Review: More than Just Kids: "Lobster" Lands with a Splash at The Tank

Lobster

Written by Kallan Dana

Directed by Hanna Yurfest

Presented by Needy Lover and The Tank at The Tank

312 West 36th Street, Manhattan, NYC

April 25–May 17, 2025

Coco McNeil, Cricket Brown, Felix Teich, and Sarina Freda in The Tank's 2025 production of Lobster. Photo by Maria Baranova

Art, adolescence, and portable classrooms collide in Lobster, Kallan Dana’s striking coming-of-age play, currently running at The Tank. Both a play of young artistic awakening and a memory play, Lobster is by turns hilarious, raw, and heartbreaking.

At its center is Nora (Cricket Brown), a high school student obsessed with creating something real. She rather boldly stages a student production of Cowboy Mouth—the 1971 one-act by Patti Smith and Sam Shepard—in a disused portable classroom, hoping to transcend the pedestrian confines of high school theatre. Next door, Beauty and the Beast rehearses, starring her sometimes-girlfriend Imogen (Annie Fang) as Belle. But in the portable, Nora tells her troupe (and the audience): “I want us to make something that is punk fucking rock.” And indeed she (like Dana) does.

Annie Fang and Cricket Brown in The Tank's 2025 production of Lobster. Photo by Maria Baranova

Dana layers and weaves Medea and Beauty and the Beast into the script, allowing texts and timelines to blur until it’s hard to tell whether we’re watching Nora, Patti Smith, or some hybrid soul struggling to make art out of love and pain. This layering also reflects the hybrid culture informing Nora’s emerging aesthetic. There’s plenty of Patti Smith, but also Euripides and musical theatre in the brew. Lobster doesn’t just depict a high school play—it captures the dangerous seduction of making art from your own life, and how that impulse can blur love, obsession, and control. Nora’s monomania inspires her cast but also unnerves them; her drive to transcend the lows of high school often verges on manipulation, particularly in her charged, shifting dynamics with Imogen.

Dana also sharply evokes the radioactivity of adolescent friendships—especially queer ones—where intimacy and betrayal flicker in tandem. Nora’s scattered voicemails to Imogen veer between seduction and accusation, revealing how first loves can leave lasting scars. (“Imogen, I’m molting so I’ll be soft for you,” she pleads, before demanding she quit Beauty and the Beast and calling her a sellout.) Meanwhile, Medea (Coco McNeil)—cast, much to her chagrin, to play the Lobster Man—simmers quietly with unrequited admiration, culminating in a devastating scene where she impulsively kisses Nora—only to be met with laughter and cold dismissal. “We’re not friends,” Nora spits, the rejection cutting as sharply as the worst sort of breakup. Lobster understands that for queer teenagers, love, creativity, and identity can become dangerously entangled.

Coco McNeil, Cricket Brown, Sarina Freda, and Felix Teich in The Tank's 2025 production of Lobster. Photo by Maria Baranova

Throughout Lobster, time and characters fold in on themselves: multiple narrators—including versions of Nora and an Imogen reflecting on those long-past high school days—compete for narrative control of the story. And though Nora is deceased in Imogen’s present-day narration, she remains a vital force on stage, physically present, refusing to be silenced by time, trauma, or death. Lobster interrogates how we remember those we loved and lost—and how those memories, however fractured, shape the selves we try to build in their wake.

The physical space mirrors this emotional volatility. A minimal musty, disused high school portable classroom, with its harsh overhead lighting, is reimagined by Nora’s vision (and a couple of bags of clothing and a disused mattress) into something resembling the ethos of The Chelsea Hotel—gritty, romantic, and charged with artistic possibility. Lighting and sound design compliment the chaos and creative potentialities: fluorescent flickers, sonic static crackles, accelerating time while evoking the potency and haze of adolescence remembered.

Sarina Freda, Felix Teich, and Cricket Brown in The Tank's 2025 production of Lobster. Photo by Maria Baranova

Cricket Brown is a revelation as Nora. Her performance is explosive and magnetic, oscillating between vulnerability and fierce conviction. Whether channeling Patti Smith or embodying a teenager on the cusp of self-discovery, Brown commands attention. Annie Fang is equally compelling as Imogen, balancing the thoughtful introspection of present-day reflection with the passion of adolescent love. Sarina Freda brings exuberant energy to Gwen, a track star turned would-be actor, landing both comedic and emotional beats with finesse, a true delight to behold. Coco McNeil dazzles as Medea, bringing an eagerness and pathos to the role that are intrinsic to so much of the (inchoate) adolescent artist; and Felix Teich as first-time actor Jeremy sensitively, and often hilariously, captures his character's evolution in unexpected directions.

Lobster is a must-see. It captures that rare, liminal space between youth and adulthood, destruction and creation. Dana’s script is unflinchingly brave and wildly funny, offering a portrait of the artist as young, queer, and hungry to make art. It’s a play that understands how youth, art, and memory tangle into something as volatile as it is beautiful—this is a transportive piece of theatre that demands to be seen, heard, and remembered.

-Noah Simon Jampol