This is clever!

My solution has always been something to the tune of:

    var kyle = Person.getByName("kyle");

But your solution is better in that the interface need not change (there could be a lot of code to rewrite in my case, if the "new" keyword were already being used everywhere).

I do like it that in your solution the interface is (or remains) elegant, but I can't help but think, as a pythonista at heart, "explicit is better than implicit". So I'm little freaked out by the idea that code reading:

    var kyle = new Person("kyle");

isn't actually constructing a new instance.