OKLAHOMA SAMOVAR

written by Alice Eve Cohen

dir. by Eric Nightengale

LaMaMa Downstairs, 2025

set and puppet design
Lights by Federico Restrepo
Costumes by Barbara Erin Delo Props by Qingan Zhan

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.

Theater Beyond Broadway: “Anna Kiraly’s set and puppet design extends this sensibility into the visual realm, offering an environment that feels at once handcrafted and metaphysical. Her designs suggest a world perpetually in the act of becoming, where objects carry histories and puppets assume the quiet authority of memory made flesh.”