Few of us dream of drudging away at a poultry factory where we cannot feel our limbs or ever escape the cold. In Lisa Ramirez’s To The Bone, we see four Latina immigrants do just do that while praying, arguing, ranting, and trying to live with each other. Olga (played by Ramirez), a frustrated green card carrying matriarch leads the platoon of fractured dreams. As the play unfolds, we discover the stories that have led each of the women to the cold.

In many ways, Ramirez succeeds. She captures the cadence of yelling mothers and women who laugh to keep from crying. Like most of the characters of the play, we suffer the indignities of the have-nots and suppress the heartaches of injustice. But Ramirez has overstuffed the plot. We are bombarded with tragedy and strife, too full on it to take a much needed breath.

Scenic designer Theresa Squire makes the most of a modest stage, surrounding us in teal and evoking the caged feeling of confinement, proposing that the poorer you are, the more you believe in color. Director Lisa Peterson choreographs the ritual of a long shift while showing the concessions we must make to survive. The ensemble is rich and varied. They sculpt fully rounded characters whose emotional life reverberates in the theater.

From sleepwalking Juana (Liza Fernandez), haunted by hope to the beautiful but doomed Carmen (Xochitl Romero), Ramirez gives us female archetypes that are specific and indelible. Each woman is an aunt or a neighbor or a woman on the bus who carries her secret tragedy with her own brand of dignity and peculiarity. The men stretch masculine prototypes of saintly saviors and savages intoxicated with their own power.

The play is said to be inspired by interviews conducted by Ms. Ramirez during a six month period in New York State's Sullivan County (perhaps explaining the overkill of a determined playwright trying to do justice to women never heard). While the play would benefit from restraint, the courage from each storyteller is enough to keep us captive. When Olga tells Lupe, her fleeing daughter, “You are the dream my mother had for me,” the whole audience takes a collective breath like a flame kindled by the promise of tomorrow.

To The Bone continues its run at the Cherry Lane Theatre through October 4. For more info and tickets, go to https://www.cherrylanetheatre.org/