While Broadway chases sure things, the real experimentation is happening in the small theaters scattered across downtown and Brooklyn. Off- and off-off-Broadway stages are incubating the boundary-pushing work that big commercial houses won't risk.

These venues, often seating fewer than a hundred, operate on shoestring budgets and outsized ambition. The fictional company Threshold Theater staged a genre-bending new play this spring that critics called the most daring production of the year, in a room barely larger than a living room.

The scene's precariousness is chronic, with companies perpetually one bad season from closing. But its defenders argue that without these tiny stages, the pipeline of new voices that eventually reaches Broadway would run dry.