Adam Kantor on the Making of Diaspora

Broadway’s Best Shows sat down with Adam Kantor to talk about Diaspora, the immersive theatrical dining experience blending global Jewish stories, culinary artistry, and live performance, now playing in the heart of Chelsea. What unfolded was a conversation about heritage, home, and the surprising ways food can become theatre and theatre can become nourishment. 

New Yorkers are not easily surprised, but stepping into Diaspora feels like entering an entirely different world. Beneath a vast multicolored parachute illuminated by Tony Award-winning lighting designer Jeff Croiter, audiences are transported into a sensory environment where storytelling, scent, taste, and memory intertwine. This is not just dinner. And it is not just a show. It is an emotional excavation of family histories, of journeys across continents, of what it means to find home.

Kantor traces the origins of Diaspora back nearly a decade to early creative explorations with Benj Pasek and Brian Bordainick (founder of Dinner Lab). Their shared curiosity about how food can function as metaphor and how culinary traditions can become theatrical language evolved into a series of highly personal narrative-driven dining experiences. They began with a theatrical Passover Seder, then How Do You Hug a Tiger?, about chef Jae Jung’s migration from Seoul to New Orleans to New York, and later PrideTable, featuring five LGBTQ+ chefs, each course tied to a different lived experience. Audiences were not just entertained; they were moved. These stories, once tucked inside family memory or cultural context, suddenly became tangible, tasted, and shared.

Diaspora continues that evolution, focusing on four Jewish immigrant families from Iran, Ukraine, Mexico, and Ethiopia. Each narrative, performed by a gifted ensemble of actor-storytellers, is paired with a dish crafted alongside chefs whose heritage directly informs the meal. These are not generalized cultural gestures; they are deeply personal culinary memoirs. One of the most revelatory chapters centers on Ethiopian Jews, documenting desert crossings, refugee camps, and eventual resettlement in Israel and New York. As Kantor notes, many guests, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, are hearing these stories for the first time. “Part of what we are doing is expanding people’s perception of what Jewishness can look like, taste like, and feel like,” he says.

A key collaborator in bringing the experience to life is Midnight Theatricals, the company hosting the production in its Chelsea venue. Their space has been transformed into an intimate parachute-covered environment that feels both whimsical and sacred. Croiter’s lighting washes the room in shifting color, guiding audiences emotionally through each family’s journey. Kantor describes Midnight Theatricals as wonderful partners creatively, logistically, and collaboratively. With major renovations ahead and ambitious projects in development, this run of Diaspora marks an important moment in their emergence.

Performances run through December 20, 2025, and while the initial block of tickets is sold out, audiences can join the waitlist at https://www.storycoursenyc.com/waitlist for potential added performances or released seats. Enthusiasm has built quickly, drawing theatregoers, food lovers, and people eager to explore global Jewish stories in a form they have never encountered before.