If someone were to give you a free-association test and say, “Broadway,” the first word that would probably spring to mind would be “musicals.” If you thought about it a little longer, you might come up with “prestige London transfers” or “star-driven revivals of beloved classics.” But “experimental, politically engaged works that challenge and subvert mainstream tastes, beliefs, and expectations by a racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse group of artists”? Not so much. By and large, those in search of provocative, boundary-pushing, diverse theater have had to head Off- or Off-Off-Broadway into that realm known as “downtown.”

In recent years, the dam between uptown and downtown has started to spring a leak or two—and this season, the floodgates have opened. A rush of new productions written and directed by artists with a distinctly downtown sensibility are reshaping the Broadway landscape. It would be an impossible exercise to generalize what these directors and playwrights are doing, not least because part of their appeal is the striking originality of their perspectives. But it’s fair to say that all of them are creating work that speaks to the moment in which we live.

Take perhaps the most conventional-seeming, but subtly subversive, of these new works, Lucas Hnath’s Hillary and Clinton, which opened on Broadway this spring. Starring a customarily fantastic Laurie Metcalf as Hillary and John Lithgow as her nettlesome helpmeet, Bill, Hnath’s play takes place in a New Hampshire hotel room on the eve of that state’s 2008 Democratic primary. He wrote it that year and has resisted any impulses to update it in relation to the 2016 election. But rather than dating the work, its time-capsule character serves to underline the relentlessness of political pressures: “I’m writing a play about the Clintons, but I’m also using them as these kind of mythic figures that offer an occasion to think about how we see people in power, how we read people in a marriage, and how we expect different things from a woman running for president than we expect from a man,” Hnath says—an inquiry that feels particularly relevant as a record number of women gear up to run in 2020.

As a straight, white male who writes offbeat but accessible narrative plays, Hnath is an inspired but not far-fetched choice for a Broadway production. A slightly less intuitive pick is the queer playwright, singer-songwriter, and performance artist Taylor Mac, whose darkly hilarious—not to mention gore-spattered—Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus opened on Broadway this spring. Best known for his transformative, extravagantly humane, now-legendary 2016 epic A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Mac got his start on the New York stage in the mid-1990s, writing and performing politically engaged drag performance pieces in downtown bars and clubs. (See: Cardiac Arrest or Venus on a Half-Clam, which, Mac says, “compared my sex life to the war on terror.”)