But can they make money?

Most of the season’s plays are commercial ventures, meaning they are backed by investors hoping to make a profit. They are less expensive than musicals, and slightly less risky to produce — history suggests that nearly half will at least break even, compared to just a third of musicals.

The biggest bettor is Mr. Rudin, whose projects include plays by Lucas Hnath (“Hillary and Clinton,” which imagines the relationship between a woman who would be president and the husband who once was); and Taylor Mac (“Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” which ponders those who clean up after political conflict).

But his chief gamble is “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Aaron Sorkin’s new adaptation of the Harper Lee novel. The show is costly — capitalized at up to $7.5 million — and had to fight a bruising battle with Ms. Lee’s estate to get to Broadway. (The estate claimed a draft script deviated too much from the novel; Mr. Rudin denied that, and the two sides settled. He declined to be interviewed about any of his productions for this story.)

Financially, the season of plays is off to a promising start.

A starry 50th anniversary revival of “The Boys in the Band,” which opened in late spring to accommodate actors’ filming schedules, was a hit.

The three others that have opened thus far have all been nonprofit productions that do not have investors — “Straight White Men,” from Second Stage, “Bernhardt/Hamlet” from Roundabout, and “The Nap” from Manhattan Theater Club.

Nonprofits have a key impact in diversifying this season, when all of the plays presented by commercial producers are by white writers, and none are by women.

Young Jean Lee’s “Straight White Men” was the first play by an Asian-American woman ever on Broadway, and even so, needed a starry cast (led by Armie Hammer and Josh Charles) to help find an audience (which it did). Manhattan Theater Club is presenting “Choir Boy,” the Broadway debut for Tarell Alvin McCraney, a prominent African-American playwright who won an Oscar for his work on the film “Moonlight.”