This new play tells the story of the Oklahoma Land Run’s only Jewish family

In Oklahoma Samovar, a new play by Alice Eve Cohen currently having its world premiere Off-Off-Broadway at experimental theater La MaMa (74 East Fourth Street), a young woman named Emily inherits a mysterious instruction from her recently deceased mother: to scatter her ashes on a stranger’s farm in Oklahoma, a place she’s never heard of and a person she’s never met.

What follows is a journey into her family’s past, unraveling secrets and stories that span five generations of Jewish immigrants, from Latvian teens who became the only Jews in the Oklahoma Land Run following their escape from the Russian army to the present day.

The two-hour play—which Cohen called a “work of dramatic fiction” when talking to New York Jewish Week—is based on the Jewish playwright and actor’s family history and will play through December 21. Tickets are available here.

Speaking to the New York Jewish Week, Cohen, who currently lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, said she first met her great-aunt Sylvia in 1987, a decade after her mother’s death.

“Both of my parents were from Borough Park, Brooklyn, so that was all very familiar to me,” she told the outlet. “And in movies and literature and Broadway shows, we see the classic Jewish immigrant on the Lower East Side. That was about as far as my imagination about my ancestors—about Jewish American history—went.” Learning about her family’s unexpected ties to Oklahoma, she added, was “a complete surprise.”

While Oklahoma Samovar is her latest project, Cohen has explored this personal history before, weaving elements of her discovery into her 2009 memoir What I Thought I Knew and her 2015 follow-up, The Year My Mother Came Back.

With this play, those long-buried stories finally take center stage, offering a rare look at a Jewish American past far beyond the familiar urban narrative.