Coco McNeil, Sarina Freda, Felix Teich, and Cricket Brown in Lobster. Photo: Maria Baranova

The titular creature in Kallan Dana’s new play, Lobster, comes from a 2015 high-school junior’s idealization of NYC counterculture circa 1970: the 60s are over; the Chelsea Hotel is the epicenter of artistic ferment; Patti Smith is shoplifting steaks and shacking up with Sam Shepard. Nora, a rebel with epic, inchoate dreams– “I never really wanted to live,” she says, “I just wanted to be remembered”–and an eye for the sublime, thrills to Smith’s description in her memoir Just Kids of feasting on lobster, dripping with butter. Smith and Shepard wrote the one-act play Cowboy Mouth together during their brief relationship, and now Nora (Cricket Brown) is directing it for their high school’s one-act festival (well, directing it guerrilla style adjacent to the festival, really, but she hasn’t exactly told anyone that), occupying a crumbling portable classroom as the school musical Beauty and the Beast rehearses endlessly next door. (There’s a delightful running joke where the most insipid selections from the score creep in whenever the door of Nora’s rehearsal room is opened; the design elements are simple but Mellie Way’s sound is on point.) 

A play about high school theater might seem to imply a play packed with high school theater kids, but what’s so refreshing and lovely about Lobster is that its vision of high school, and of what theater means to us in high school, is far broader than that stereotype. Here, we do have one character who’s auditioning for Juillard and taking her craft with deadly seriousness, but we also have Nora’s (ex-)(ish)girlfriend, Imogen (Annie Fang), who per Nora thinks musical theater is “really really stupid” and yet finds herself enjoying being both “a freakin weirdo” and the princess in the high school musical. Far from being extroverts with perfect pitch, her ensemble are all yearning for community and communion and an escape from ordinary life, drawn to Nora’s aura of mission like ducklings imprinting on anyone who’ll show them how to live. This production seems like a disaster by all conventional measures, and yet the three who perform it will be bound together by this experience for a long, long time–into the play’s afterlife and their adulthood, from where they, as what the script calls the “Memoirists,” comment back on the action and how they remember it. 

Nora is directing this play not for the love of theater but as a Project to glue her relationship with Imogen back together and to commune with the spirits of Smith and Shepard. But the first part of this goal failed even before auditions, after a disastrous spring break trip with Imogen. Now, she can feel the whole thing–her whole life–slipping away at every moment. Her fervor feels almost consumptive; we can already see her burning too bright and burning out too fast. In the obsessive throes of her breakup with Imogen—they were their school’s coolest gay couple but also showily codependent in a way that even other teenagers noticed—and mostly abandoned by her parents, she’s skipping class and spiraling out. 

Only a handful of people show up to Nora’s auditions, rather than the inescapable Beauty and the Beast. Working with what she can get, she casts as her Sam Shepard and Patti Smith stand-ins Jeremy (Felix Teich), a congenial kid who’s excited about getting to play the drums he got for Christmas onstage, and Gwen (Sarina Freda), a popular athlete who normally runs track but is doing this instead, for reasons that we slowly surmise; Gwen is both determined to be enthusiastic and utterly at sea. (Another running joke involves her inability or refusal to pronounce her character’s name correctly.) The third actor is our token capital T theater kid, Medea (not named for the Greek heroine; played by Coco McNeil), who’s taking this all very seriously and who is filled with rage over Nora’s disinterest in her character, the Lobster Man–or Nora’s disinterest in her. 

Dana and director Hanna Yurfest do a marvelous job of capturing the emotional landscape of making theater, even (or perhaps especially) messy and potentially disastrous experimental theater. (Both Sam Shepard and Patti Smith are enormously gifted artists, but Cowboy Mouth is a hot mess that was written in a haze of lust and ended badly, when Shepard returned to his wife; as Smith describes it in a quote that Dana uses as an epigraph for the script, it was more ritual than play anyway.) All the high points are here: The tentative embrace of transgressive language and attitudes, gradually growing in confidence. The way everyone lines up behind Nora’s certainty even when they have no idea what’s going on. (All of them have to go away and look up Patti Smith and Sam Shepard after auditions; only Nora idolizes them.) The free floating sexual energy that hovers over the whole thing. (Gwen sort of has a boyfriend, now a freshman in college, but she and Jeremy are drawn closer and closer throughout the play, sparking and sublimating; Medea has built her childhood friendship with Nora into a true-love narrative that exists only in her own mind and will be crushed by Nora with an indifference that’s far crueler than cruelty; Nora constantly pours her heart out to Imogen’s voicemail in boundary obliterating ways.)

Yurfest crafts the individual performances sharply as well; certain specific line readings are pure viewpoints into the hearts of these characters: Felix Teich infusing terror and shame into Jeremy’s delivery of a Cowboy Mouth line where he has to call Gwen’s character a “cunt,” for example. The mixture of heartbreak and uncertainty and pride in Sarina Freda’s answer to Jeremy’s question about whether her onetime prom date is her boyfriend. The way each of the voicemails Cricket Brown delivers from Nora to Imogen start casual and build in intensity until her manic energy overflows.

But while Lobster would be enjoyable and well-executed as simply a play about high school theater, it’s the addition of the retrospective perspective that makes the piece special, the glimpses at a less sublime but mostly contented future that we see for these characters, and the serene acceptance with which all four actors portray their older selves. They won’t end up living punk rock lives in the Chelsea Hotel; Nora will be the one who doesn’t make it to that later, calmer stage of being, but all of them will carry her with them, will remember what she taught them. Nora “had a way of making me realize that I had not yet experienced anything,” one of them says. And while we get only glimpses into the adulthoods of Jeremy, Gwen, Medea, and Imogen, we see that they’re all at some sort of peace with their life choices, that they all took something away from this experience about how to live and how to love–but also that their lives may look nothing like they’d imagined. Jeremy even winds up an actor; Imogen, half of the coolest gay couple in their high school, winds up “a woman who snaps at her daughter when she cries”; Gwen, so worried about how others see her, finds peace in her solitude. And Lobster, for all its wry humor about the dramas of high school, winds up as a deeply felt meditation on solitude, motherhood, and the sublime.