"Oklahoma Samovar" Review

25 minutes into Alice Eve Cohen’s play Oklahoma Samovar, Hattie—an immigrant from Latvia—asks her newly-Kansan husband, “How will we be Jewish without other Jews?” 

It’s a compelling question, raising points about practicing Judaism in diaspora and acclimating to life in these United States in the years before mass Jewish migration. I expected this question to serve as a kind of thesis statement for the play, which won the 2021 National Jewish Playwriting Contest and opened this week at The Downstairs at La MaMa. 

Instead, I found the piece more interested in asking these kinds of questions than attempting to answer them. When it does answer a question—like another one central to the play, “Why did my mother want her ashes scattered on this farm?”—the road there is long-winded and troubled. There is something very Jewish about not answering or half-answering a question, but it is not dramaturgically compelling as an audience member to experience this over and over, especially with an act break placed only 45 minutes into a 130-minute play. 

Oklahoma Samovar is inspired by stories about Cohen’s great-grandparents, who were the only Jews to participate in the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run. The keeper of those stories was her great aunt Sylvia, played here by the wonderfully game Joyce Cohen. We’re told that Sylvia’s memory is faulty; she keeps forgetting she is talking to her great niece and not her sister, and she needs to start and stop a few times before launching into the family narrative she knows like the back of her hand. Storytelling, especially when the storyteller has memory issues, can be disjointed and tonally inconsistent. I was very charmed by Sylvia as a character, and I appreciated this play as a record of a unique Jewish-American experience. But the experience of Sylvia’s stories I had as an audience member was jarring in ways the production didn’t earn, often oscillating between scenes of domestic tranquility and violence without a moment’s notice. 

The strongest moments of Oklahoma Samovar come from the intergenerational relationships between the women in this family, which range from troubled to intimate. All of the women onstage—Cohen as Sylvia and Mrs. Giventer, Sarah Chalfie as Hattie and Maxine (I wanted 9 more scenes with Maxine!), Nadia Diamond as Emily and Rose, and Seren Kaiser as Little Clara—give excellent performances. In particular, Joyce Cohen’s range is an asset to this production; she deftly differentiates characters from Sylvia as a young girl to Sylvia as an old woman to an Irish banker to Mrs. Giventer, Rose’s hard-line, old-world mother-in-law. When the women of Oklahoma Samovar talk to each other, they drop time-appropriate facades and speak frankly about their inner lives and what they are going through. In an especially powerful scene, three generations of family members speak to each other across time, highlighting the cycles each of these women suffers through as members of the same narrative. The play shines when the characters react to their emotional lives and not just their given circumstances.