Born Ready Who’d expect the trash-championing Factory Theater to mount an unabashedly sentimental comedy with legit dance numbers, heart-on-the-sleeve romance, and only a couple veiled vagina jokes? Stacie Barra’s charming, well-crafted homage to 1950s backstage intrigue films (think a kinder, gentler All About Eve) focuses on former child film star Marion Kroft’s struggle to restart her alcohol-steeped career in television variety shows. With the unlikely assistance of enthusiastic chorus girl Harriet, whose Iowa naivete may mask questionable motives, Kroft finds legit stardom looming. Like most of the cast, Eleanor Katz as Kroft and Clara Byczkowski as Harriet cleverly lampoon midcentury cinematic acting tropes without compromising the script’s sincere emotions. While director Wm. Bullion occasionally struggles to find adequately snappy pacing, his two-hour production is graceful and endearing. —Justin Hayford
In to America The Griffin Theatre’s theatrical documentary gives voice—or rather, many voices—to the migrant experience in America. In a style recalling the work of filmmaker Ken Burns, playwright William Massolia has stitched together selections from letters, diaries, biographies, and oral histories to chronicle the experiences of people who came to this continent over the past 400 years: colonists seeking a fresh start in a new world, slaves brutally brought here in chains, refugees fleeing religious persecution and war. The monologues also chronicle the movement of people across the nation—the westward expansion of white settlers into land taken from native inhabitants by war or trickery, the Great Migration of southern blacks to the urban north in the 1910s. These are stories of hardship and heartbreak, but also of the thrill of discovery and, for some, the exaltation of freedom from oppression. Under Dorothy Milne’s direction, each of the excellent 13 actors plays multiple roles, representing an astonishing range of ethnic backgrounds with emotional authenticity and pinpoint-precise accents. —Albert Williams
