On a Monday night this winter, at a gala in a Beaux-Arts former bank downtown, the young playwright Rachel Bonds, whose luminous “Sundown, Yellow Moon” is currently onstage uptown, made a showstopper of a speech, on a night not lacking in potential showstoppers. The event was a fund-raiser for the nonprofit Off Broadway theatre and artist incubator Ars Nova. It had a Russia-in-winter theme—bear-shaped ice sculpture, stilt walkers, faux-fur hats—in honor of the company’s first Broadway transfer, Dave Malloy’s “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” It featured songs from the show, performed by Malloy, Josh Groban, Denée Benton, and others. But when Bonds spoke people made sounds of amazement: as Ars Nova’s playwright-in-residence, she said, she was paid a salary and given benefits. Good benefits. “I actually went to the dentist,” she said, to “ooh”s. “I also had my first child.” Prenatal care, delivery, everything, was covered by her Ars Nova health insurance. “He’s eight weeks old, and it’s my first night away from him,” she said. “So that tells you how much Ars Nova means to me.” After her speech, she went out to the street and got a car home. Inside, the party raged on, with vodka and accordions.

Artists in the United States don’t tend to get paid a salary to make art. (Forget dental.) That night, Bonds had also announced the launch of Ars Nova’s Fair Pay Initiative, which, beginning January 1st, raised pay for artists and staff from a minimum to a living wage. Ars Nova is unusual—creatively, structurally, and otherwise. It’s not a traditional theatre company; it’s a finder, developer, and nurturer of unconventional artists working in hybrid forms. It produces experimental plays, like the recent “Small Mouth Sounds” and “Underground Railroad Game,” and musicals, like “Great Comet” and the forthcoming “KPOP,” opening this fall. But it also, with equal enthusiasm, runs music-theatre residencies and a workshop for up-and-coming playwrights; artists’ retreats; a festival of new comedy, theatre, and music talent; and a vaudevillian comedy and variety series, “Showgasm,” hosted, until recently, by the performer John Early. It also programs an adventurous range of short-run and one-night shows, such as cabaret-style literary humor by Isaac Oliver, whose recent show featured Trump-weary guests hollering into a scream jar.

Ars Nova’s goal is not to produce a season of plays that aspire to Broadway; it’s to support and encourage emerging artists. Many talents who honed their voices and aesthetic at Ars Nova during its early years—including Annie Baker, Billy Eichner, Bridget Everett, Amy Herzog, Thomas Kail, Elizabeth Meriwether (“New Girl”), Lin-Manuel Miranda, Robin Lord Taylor (“Gotham”), Alex Timbers, and Beau Willimon (“House of Cards”)—have since brought innovative work to much wider audiences. Ars Nova’s artistic director, Jason Eagan, said, “It’s not that we made ‘Hamilton’—it’s that we supported Lin finding his voice when no one knew who Lin was. It’s more exciting to us that we had a step in preparing him to make something like ‘Hamilton.’ ” If artists want to write a book, create a Web series, or host an absurdist TV game show, Ars Nova helps them figure out how to get there.

I became interested in Ars Nova’s story last year, while working on a profile of Billy Eichner, whose hyper, meta live talk show “Creation Nation,” with Robin Lord Taylor, was one of Ars Nova’s early successes. As I talked to them and to members of their cohort—Willimon, Timbers, Kail—I became more and more fascinated not just by Ars Nova’s track record and aesthetic but by its surprising, moving history. I’d been there several times over the years, including to see one of the first performances of “Great Comet,” but it took me a while to understand what Ars Nova was. It’s a tiny, state-of-the-art theatre in a long, narrow building in a desolate section of the far West Fifties, and it’s strangely sophisticated for a scrappy performance space. If, a decade or so ago, you went there on a bitterly cold night to see a friend sing odd comedic songs, you might have exited through its impressive front door a bit charmed, a bit flummoxed. But you could have also seen and heard genius working itself out.

Though some of its writers, performers, and works have become household names—in cosmopolitan households, anyway—Ars Nova itself has received less attention. Some people first heard of it last year, when “Great Comet” went to Broadway and Ars Nova made headlines over a bizarre billing injustice. Alums and allies came out in force, writing impassioned testimonials in its defense and coining the hashtag #imwithars; the wrong was swiftly made right, in Ars Nova’s favor. Otherwise, Ars Nova has continued along, beloved by its community, quietly cultivating the careers of emerging artists—like Sarah DeLappe, who wrote the ingenious teen-soccer play “The Wolves”—by providing them with space, time, money, guidance, deadlines, feedback, retreats, community, and pizza.

Ars Nova was founded in 2002 by Jenny and Jon Steingart. In 1997, Jenny’s brother, Gabe Wiener, a twenty-six-year-old classical-music producer, died of a brain aneurysm. A lay musicologist (finding Gregorian chants in Hebrew; commissioning a historically accurate harpsichord) who founded his own early-music label, Pro Gloria Musicae, Wiener had bought a plot of land in a neighborhood of recording and mastering studios. He was in the process of building a studio of his own when he died. Jenny Steingart told me, “The week he died, at the end of the shiva, one of the waitresses asked if she could speak to me in the kitchen.” The young woman told her that all week, after listening to people talk about Gabe, she had been inspired to go home and paint. “She said, ‘I painted a whole new series of work.’ ” Then she took out a portfolio and showed Jenny the paintings. “I was so blown away,” Steingart said. “Gabe’s life and his death had inspired new art to happen in another medium.” It became clearer to her that though she could not live out Gabe’s specific dream, she could honor it by helping to foster new art.

The Steingarts, who had experience in comedy and theatre production, decided to view the building as a gift from Gabe, and they envisioned a “dynamic clubhouse” that would support the work of gifted music, theatre, and comedy artists in the early stages of their careers. Jenny said, “That horrible cliché ‘When life gives you lemons . . .’—I just thought, like, This is going to be the biggest fucking lemonade stand we can come up with.” They opened Ars Nova’s doors in 2002. They were introduced to Jason Eagan, a young talent at New York Theatre Workshop. “He came in and we had an amazing meeting,” she said. “We said, ‘If you were going to program the space, who would you program it with?’ ” His list had “everybody who was on our list, plus people we didn’t even know,” she said. “It was like love at first sight.”

Eagan began finding performers and booking shows. (He is now Ars Nova’s artistic director.) He told me, “Jon and Jenny wrote this beautiful mission to support early-career artists making music, theatre, and comedy, and I sort of developed that further into artists who have an interest in where those things blend or merge.” He favors “unicorns,” he said: unexpected, rare, spectacular performers who don’t conform to a genre. Jenny Steingart said, “In our first year, we had two completely separate productions that required a trapeze.”

Eagan said, “Although my first title was producer, I was really a booking person of sorts, developing my eye and learning my aesthetic by having space to constantly program in a more pop-up way. I was programming nine shows a week.” And he did it with a sense of urgency, in part because independent venues like Fez, the Luna Lounge, and the Zipper Theatre were disappearing. “That really fuelled us at the beginning,” Eagan said. “I was out there 24/7, trying to find these people and tell them about Ars Nova so we could support them.” He and the Steingarts wanted to do what they could “to make sure that New York stays a destination for this kind of work and these kinds of artists.”