When future cultural historians, should there be any, look back on the contemporary stage, I hope they are able to discern, amid the din of jukeboxes and the lumbering of overproduced apes, the real theater of our time.

I mean Public Works, that program of passion plays for anxious, left-leaning New Yorkers: as emblematic of our fears and hopes as the ones at Oberammergau were for 17th-century Bavarians and the Dionysia was for ancient Greeks.

Speaking of Greece, did I mention that the series’s current offering, running through Sunday, is “Hercules”? And not even the one by Euripides but the one by a committee of Hollywood scriptmongers writing for an audience of tweens?

You will recall that most Labor Days since 2013, at the end of its regular season of Shakespeare in the Park, the Public Theater has mounted a huge (and free) show involving a handful of professional actors and many multiples more of amateurs. We have seen streamlined and musicalized new versions of “The Tempest,” “Twelfth Night” and even “The Odyssey” offered as models of civic engagement and reminders of the heritage of provocation and healing the theater has offered for centuries to troubled cities.