Dorothea (Tyne Daly) and her lover, Greta (Elisabeth Henry), run The Bread Factory, a community theater hosting after-school programs for the arts, in the small town of Checkford. When two Chinese performance artists, May Ray (Janet Hsieh and George Young), arrive in town to open the FEEL Institute across the street, The Bread Factory's much-needed funding from the school system and a government subsidy remains at stake. The small community theater will have to close if it loses the funding. Its staff members, i.e. Jordan (Janeane Garofalo), a filmmaker teaching students about filmmaking, would end up losing their jobs. While fighting to save The Bread Factory, Dorothea and Greta concurrently spend their time directing a production of the play Hecuba by Euripides.

      Separated into two parts, "For the Sake of Gold" and "Walk With Me a While," A Bread Factory is a wise, funny and genuinely heartfelt story about a community within a small town battling against a much larger force: May Ray, vapid performance artists who can bring more fame and fortune to Checkford with their assistance from Hollywood actors like Trooper Jaymes (Chris Conroy). The school board's decision to fund May Ray instead of The Bread Factory is, essentially, a Faustian bargain because losing The Bread Factory means losing a priceless community that's an essential part of the small town's artistic soul which money cannot buy. Its talented, hard-working employees would lose their livelihoods and no longer be able to be a part of a community that took years to create.

     Writer/director Patrick Wang immerses audience in the daily lives of the students and employees at The Bread Factory so that you can grasp precisely what Checkford would lose if and when the community theater will close. It's interesting to observe the parallels between the story of A Bread Factory and the story within the play Hecuba. Wang's sensitively-written, intelligent screenplay brims with wit, humor and tenderness without becoming schmaltzy, preachy or melodramatic. Not every part of the film feels completely true-to-life, i.e. a very young projectionist, Simon (Keaton Nigel Cooke), who's wise beyond his years, but that's forgivable because not every drama has to be a 100% slice-of-life. Each performance feels natural, especially when it comes to the scene-stealing, charismatic Tyne Daly. Janeane Garofalo is very funny, over-the-top and snarky filmmaking teacher.

      Wang clearly understands that the more specific and detailed a story is, the more universal it becomes. There are subplots involving Sir Walter (Brian Murray), an actor who has yet to forgive a theater critic, Jean Marc (Philip Kerr), for criticizing his performance in a play 5 decades ago. Jan (Glynnis O'Connor) is a newspaper editor who's quite supportive of The Bread Factory. There's also Max (Zachary Sayle), a teenager who has a crush on his classmate, Julie (Erica Durham). You'll even find a few surprises within the second part which has some exuberant scenes of characters breaking into song-and-dance in places where you'd least expect them to---like a diner, for instance. With so many characters, the film could've easily turned into an overstuffed, uncooked, uneven mess, but thanks to Wang's impeccable filmmaking skills and humanism along with the terrific editing by Elwaldo Baptiste, it all flows in a way that feels increasingly engrossing and captivating with very few dull moments.