Review: Oklahoma Samovar Never Quite Reaches a Boil

What makes a story worth telling? That’s the question bothering Emily (Nadia Diamond), a grieving college student who shows up in Oklahoma in 1987, torn over whether to honor her mother’s final request to have her ashes scattered on a mysterious farm. To get close to the truth, Emily will need to hear a whole lot of family history from Sylvia (Joyce Cohen), the farmland’s caretaker who lives alone surrounded by ghosts: “Everyone I know is dead, and they’re always visitin’ me,” Sylvia explains.

But it’s also the broader inquiry undergirding Oklahoma Samovar, an untidily expansive fictionalization of playwright Alice Eve Cohen’s own ancestral story.

Her tale is certainly unusual. Over three generations, her family played genealogical leapfrog: great-grandparents Jake (Sahar Lev-Shomer) and Hattie (Sarah Chalfie) left Latvia and joined the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run, the only Jews to settle on that forcibly vacated land. “These people don’t know what a Jew is, so they don’t have any prejudice against us,” Jake celebrates. Their daughter Rose (also Diamond), who’s been raised nearly secularly in rural Oklahoma, marries into an Orthodox family in Brooklyn, but Rose’s daughter Clara (Seren Kaiser) rejects all her family history entirely.

Eric Nightengale’s direction aims for stylized, fluid storytelling, but neither the staging nor the performances deliver a consistent vision. Alice Eve Cohen’s thematic conjuring of magical realism never really materializes: the moments of ancestral haunting come across as ornamental only, save for a creepy moment when a bloody Oklahoma settler, killed by Jake years earlier in self-defense, takes the empty chair at the Seder table like a Passover Banquo.

\The script also calls for significant tone-setting puppetry throughout, but in this iteration, there are only two fleeting puppet cameos late in the show. Sometimes characters speak with accents when they’re meant to be speaking in their native tongues, à la last season’s English, but at other times that device is discarded. The production’s imprecision distracts from what could be a more boldly evocative script.

The clearest indication of sharp, small-ensemble storytelling comes in a couple instances of clever double-casting. Chalfie is particularly compelling and blithely tortured when she morphs into Rose’s sister-in-law, a devil-may-care bisexual flapper. Joyce Cohen adroitly portrays two wildly different elderly women, plus a 4-year-old and an Irish banker in Kansas. That’s the sort of playful dexterity a work of this scope demands, especially with only a six-person cast.

And there’s one truly gorgeous moment of transformative staging, too, when the fabric forming Hattie’s baby bump billows suddenly into the blanket of a stillborn child, as this time-passing transition elides one chanted Mourner’s Kaddish with another.

 Oklahoma Samovar gets more engaging as it grows more unwieldy. There’s a certain audience satisfaction in mastering the family tree, akin to the pleasures of reading Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s bountiful One Hundred Years of Solitude. And the intergenerational tensions between Jewish traditionalism and assimilation become more potent as the contrasts between Riga, Oklahoma, and Brooklyn take shape across history.

But Emily’s tape recorder interrogation of Sylvia’s fragile memory isn’t strong enough to hold all the pieces together: as an avatar for the playwright, Emily isn’t yet a fully formed character, and the storytelling perspective vanishes entirely for much of the play’s second half. With Emily an unpersuasive listener, the play’s central argument—the importance of elders retelling stories to impact the younger generations—remains unpersuasive, too. Oklahoma Samovar is sweeping, yes, but not all the dust of family history winds up in the pan.