In 1887, two Latvian teenagers flee the Russian Army and become the only Jews in the Oklahoma Land Run. A hundred years later, twenty-year-old Emily tries to decipher her late mother’s mysterious request to have her ashes spread on a stranger’s farm, in a place she has never heard of. Based on the playwright’s ancestors, the only Jews in the Oklahoma Land Run, the play wrestles with themes of immigration, assimilation, generational trauma, and the transcendent power of mother-daughter love. In Oklahoma Samovar, five generations put down roots and dig graves, embodying their own Jewish variations on the turbulent and mythologized American Dream.

It is a play about storytelling: stories that change with every teller and each new telling; stories that are joyfully told and embellished; and hidden family stories filled with shame and despair. Secret stories have a life of their own; they survive, carried from one generation to the next, through ineffable ancestral memories, sometimes with the help of ghosts.

Driven by the very different perspectives of a young woman and an old woman, Alice Eve Cohen’s personal and thought-provoking play examines the identity, traditions, and culture clashes that shape one Jewish family’s immigrant experience. Merging real events with magic realism, the play is performed by a cast of six, along with puppets and animated objects. Based on the playwright's family history, OKLAHOMA SAMOVAR is an utterly human and absolutely unique American story.