Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

Can film and theater live happily together in the same room? It’s not as if they haven’t had a long relationship already, with each regularly borrowing stories and stars from the other. But now these separate but equal art forms are attempting to practice cohabitation.

As in many relationships, only half of the couple is truly equipped to make the effort. Film, after all, is recorded action and exists mostly in two dimensions (even when it’s 3-D), which means it can’t invite live theater into its world. On the other hand, there’s nothing to stop theater artists from setting up a projector and showing a movie onstage, letting live performers interact with, or ignore, their two-dimensional equivalents.

Which is what has been happening more and more recently, reflecting the role that recorded reality and screens large and small now play in virtually every aspect of everyday lives. At the Under the Radar festival of experimental theater in New York this month I came upon striking works in which film or video played a significant (and in one case dominant) role, reminding us that, these days, everyone’s potentially a moviemaker.

In “Alexis. A Greek Tragedy,” a rousing meditation on youthful rebellions past and present from the the Italian troupe Motus, video footage and elemental theater existed cheek by jowl. In “Super Night Shot,” the British-German company Gob Squad set itself the task of creating a complete film with hand-held cameras on the streets near the Public Theater within the hour. It then showed that film, unedited, on a Public stage.

There has been some argument as to whether “Super Night Shot” even qualifies as theater. But in its sweaty immediacy and sense of just-displaced reality, it unquestionably feeds the debate about the relationship between screen and stage.

In 1987 the master avant-gardist Richard Foreman presented a work with the bald and declarative title “Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good.” The show’s premise wasn’t hard to figure out: Film, in its literal and detailed representation of the world, leaves little to the imagination, while radio (and by extension, the kind of nonlinear, metaphoric theater that was Mr. Foreman’s specialty) challenges our minds to fill in the blanks.

That doesn’t mean that Mr. Foreman, who has been absent from the theater in recent years, didn’t admit film into his creative sanctuary. An honest-to-gosh movie within the play figured briefly in “Film Is Evil.” And his late-career theatrical works offered parallel universes embodied by eccentrically stylized live performers and more naturalistic-looking, if artificially posed, actors on film.

The stage actors would gaze and paw quizzically at the projected images in the way cats sometimes react to what’s on television. We audience members, in turn, were likely to find both sets of performers equally enigmatic, though in different ways. And pondering that difference was what made these mixed-media chamber pieces so stimulating.

Paula Court

Such dialogues between live and recorded realities have long been an invigorating part of the modus operandi of the Wooster Group, that eternally vital experimental troupe. Its “House/Lights,” staged in New York in 1999, mixed a Gertrude Stein opera libretto and an obscure vintage bondage movie so thoroughly that dimensions were scrambled beyond distinction.

The ensemble members — particularly, the troupe’s longtime (and incomparable) leading lady, Kate Valk — were so mechanically ritualized in their movements, with voices so layered and distorted by artificial amplification, that their in-the-flesh selves often registered as less “natural” than their on-screen counterparts did. “House/Lights” played wittily and disturbingly on how, in an age of increasingly mixed, attention-fragmenting media, it becomes more and more difficult for us to trust our senses. When I think back on that show, it’s not a specific image of Ms. Valk in person or on screen that I recall so much as some phantasmal, in-between version.

Memory, of course, is what enshrines live theater and gives it more of a mystical, elusive afterglow than film, which you can usually revisit and replay. When in 2007 the Wooster Group took on that Olympus of theater “Hamlet,” it did so by contrasting a grainy 1964 film of a fabled stage production starring Richard Burton with live actors performing the same material, in and out of sync with what was on screen. That production was an oddly affecting evocation of how we remember and preserve the ephemeral art of the stage.

When mainstream theater uses film, it often seems self-conscious and disruptive in ways its creators surely don’t intend. For example filmed sequences using the actors who appeared in Alan Bennett’s “History Boys” (on Broadway in 2006) were used to conjure a sense of place (a traditional British boys’ school) between scenes. And in a generally flawless production by Nicholas Hytner, those video sequences sounded false notes that somehow called into question the self-contained world of the play.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

I felt the same way about Simon McBurney’s 2008 revival of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” which used documentary footage of factory assembly lines and war scenes from the 1940s. But since Mr. McBurney’s production was so theatrically stylized in its acting and its design, the use of film seemed in a way to patronize the play. The suggestion was that we needed to be reminded that the artificial, symbolic activities onstage were emblems of something that had really happened.

On the other hand, Sam Mendes’s touring Anglo-American production of “Richard III,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through March 4, makes pointed and sardonic use of film in ways familiar to today’s television audiences. As a conniving nobleman determined to capture the crown of England, Richard the politician, played by Kevin Spacey, takes his case to the public via a televised speech, with his videotaped face projected on the stage.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Here you’re aware of the manipulative intelligence of a character, shaping a projected image that both glorifies and disguises. (Knowing Mr. Spacey’s work on both film and stage adds an extra tastiness to our sense of the discrepancies between Richard in two and three dimensions.)

The Belgian director Ivo van Hove — who takes theatrical deconstruction to the point of detonation — uses simulcast video with varying success. He has said his aim is “to make an X-ray of a character,” and a camera would seem the obvious tool for this endeavor. Yet its use in his productions of Molière’s “Misanthrope” and Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes,” both staged at the New York Theater Workshop, felt more decorative than analytical.

On the other hand, the same technique truly enriched his adaptation of the John Cassavetes movie “Opening Night,” a portrait of the necessarily divided identities of actors in performance. The projected images in this show, seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008, became a natural reflection of the doubleness of both acting itself and the experience of being an audience member.

For the interdisciplinary auteur Jay Scheib mixing media is as much a socio-philosophical statement as an aesthetic one. His “World of Wires,” seen this month at the Kitchen in New York, follows the descent of one brave computer techie into an alternative, digitally simulated universe. Based on a 1973 television series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “World of Wires” shares the high-tech political paranoia of more recent films like “The Matrix.”

It seems to ask, with equal measures of wonder and anxiety (and, thank heaven, a sense of humor) that favorite collegiate question “What if the reality we’re living in has been created by somebody else?” Mr. Scheib was his own cameraman for this production, trailing his actors and turning them into on-screen simulacra before our eyes. The show pulled off some nifty trompe l’oeil effects. But its most startling and convincing moments — like the collapse of a wall into the laps of audience members — were not cinematic but purely theatrical.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Ultimately of course every artistic representation of reality is imperfect. And one of the things I loved about “Alexis. A Greek Tragedy” was its awareness of such limitations. An impressionistic analysis of the student rebellions in Greece in 2008, following the killing of a 15-year-old boy by a policeman, “Alexis” featured both documentary videotape and in-the-moment Method-style acting sessions (portraying scenes from Sophocles’ “Antigone”), as well as boundary-melting sequences that instantly translated live action into frozen photographic images.

All these representations were deliberately and consistently undermined by the Motus troupe. Heated exchanges from “Antigone” would turn into arguments between the performers playing Sophocles’ characters. And the computer-projected footage would regularly be shrunk into near invisibility or shown on surfaces that mottled and warped the images.

These distortions suggested, to me at least, how hard it is to capture what people feel in times of crisis. Our awareness and suspicions of the inexactitude of art are heightened in those moments when apocalypse seems to threaten.