If you think a story about workers in a poultry factory sounds grisly, you don’t know the half of it.

Oakland’s Ubuntu Theater Project is performing the West Coast premiere of “To the Bone,” a relentlessly bleak drama about exploited undocumented Central American immigrant women working at a chicken factory in upstate New York. The play, which debuted off-Broadway in 2014, is by Lisa Ramirez, now an Ubuntu company member whose solo show “Exit Cuckoo (Nanny in Motherland)” was staged by the group last year.

Not only do the women in the factory perform achingly repetitive movements all day, their slave driver of a supervisor (a domineering Francisco Arcila) barks orders at them to work faster, without breaks. The factory owner (William Hartfield, creepy and confrontational) threatens workers with replacement or deportation if they offer any resistance to the terrible working conditions.

The women all live together as well, though that appears to be an entirely separate arrangement from work. Juana (a melancholy Sarita Ocon) always seems haunted, sleepwalking mournfully every night as she desperately repeats “go back” over and over. Olga (playwright Ramirez, restless and rash, reprising the role she played in New York) is sardonic and rebellious, which is all very well for her because she’s the only one with a green card. The older Reina (amiable Wilma Bonet) is almost her opposite, maddeningly averse to making any waves no matter what happens, a position that becomes more and more untenable even as she clings to it.

Reina is waiting for her niece Carmen to arrive from Honduras, and when Carla Gallardo’s taciturn but agreeable Carmen shows up, it seems like a worrisome development because a young woman seemingly so perfectly innocent and almost blank probably isn’t going to fare well in this grim world.

Olga’s tomboyish and hip-hop-loving daughter, Lupe (a prickly, energetic Juliana Aiden), puts aside her usual irritableness to become downright effusive around Carmen, and chatty driver Jorge (good-natured and outgoing Juan Amador) takes more than a little liking to her as well.

The play is staged in a circular, domed upstairs room at Brooklyn Preserve, the 1887 Oakland building that was originally Brooklyn Presbyterian Church, and later Grace Temple Baptist Church, where Ubuntu is now in residence.

The set by Giulio Cesare Perrone and Marcel Castanchoa encloses the stage in a wire cage, with crates lined with chicken wire for seats. Around the edges of the stage are some strips of soil with small altars of novena candles placed atop them. Director and company co-artistic director Michael Socrates Moran lends the action a dreamlike quality with occasional dancerly synchronized movements, always among the women.

It’s obvious that this is all going to end tragically in some way or another, but as one misfortune piles upon another the relentless onslaught becomes almost (but not quite) comical. At the same time, the impunity with which the factory boss operates is appropriately enraging. Ultimately it becomes hard not to hope that the repetitive stabbing motions that the workers use to separate chicken parts all day might at some point be put to another use. That may be a gruesome sort of hope, but hope is in short supply in this story, so one has to grab hold of it wherever it can be found.

Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.

‘TO THE BONE’

By Lisa Ramirez, presented by Ubuntu Theater Project

Through: April 23

Where: Brooklyn Preserve, 1433 12th Ave., Oakland

Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes, one intermission

Tickets: $15-$35; www.ubuntutheaterproject.com