It’s all well and good that some theaters are making money during the pandemic by producing what can only be called quasi-theater: magic shows, murder mysteries, a hundred variations on “A Christmas Carol.” I won’t congratulate them here; let their income be its own reward. With luck, they may keep the spark of performance alive to light another night.

The theaters I want to acknowledge now are those that are producing plays of artistic merit in an environment even more hostile to them than usual. That’s a tougher job, but it’s the one that will make the eventual reopening of our stages worth the effort.

These are companies that have doubled down on meaty classics and serious new work, reconfiguring whole seasons for socially distanced delivery systems. Look at the of-the-minute short films from the Steppenwolf Theater Company, the updated verse comedies from Molière in the Park and the all-audio lineup of seven productions from the Williamstown Theater Festival and Audible.

Between new work and classics, though, lies an especially endangered category: recent plays that were emerging into the wider culture after successful New York debuts when the pandemic curtailed their options for production. Lacking familiar titles, and demanding the most thoughtful attention to language and ideas, these plays do not immediately suggest themselves as quick profit centers in an industry trying to pivot on a dime.

So it was heartening, earlier this fall, to see the Maryland-based Olney Theater Center present such an inventive Zoom version of “The Humans,” Stephen Karam’s 2015 play about a family’s economic and spiritual upheaval. Also heartening: Early next year, Dominique Morisseau’s “Paradise Blue,” a jazz noir drama seen at the Signature Theater in New York in 2018, will get the Williamstown-Audible treatment for which it seems, in its intense musicality, even better suited.

Right now, though, I’m floating on the high of seeing, in new formats, two plays I loved the first time around. One is Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 that the Philadelphia Theater Company is offering in an exhilarating Zoom staging through Dec. 20. The other, Will Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” a Pulitzer finalist earlier this year, can be seen through Dec. 13 in a devastating film-theater hybrid from the Wilma Theater, also in Philadelphia.

These are not just dramas; they were considerable dramas to produce. To begin with, “The Wolves” has a big cast; it follows nine teenage girls on an indoor soccer team for several months as they stretch, literally and figuratively. Expectations for it were big as well. Paige Price, the company’s producing artistic director, said “The Wolves” had already been breaking advance sale records when local Covid-19 regulations forced her to shut down production two days before rehearsals were to begin in March.

As Price describes it, there immediately began a hectic process of figuring out what to do besides “trashing the set.” With all that ticket income wiped out, she and the director, Nell Bang-Jensen, had to start from scratch. “Nobody wants to do taped Zoom readings,” Price explained — and “The Wolves” especially, with its blizzard of crosscutting conversation, would probably fall fatally flat in that format.

But as the summer progressed, so did the flexibility of the technology. By sending each actor not only her costumes and props (crutches from Amazon!) but also her own sound equipment and green screen kit, the production team was able to vary the framing in each Zoom box, a huge improvement on early pandemic experiments that were basically neck-up and as visually interesting as tic-tac-toe.

On the other hand, because the theater couldn’t afford to send high-resolution cameras — the budget for the show was $55,000 instead of the $350,000 that might have been spent onstage — the production had to make do with smartphone footage that rendered full-screen close-ups unusable.

In the end, the tech restrictions and handmade quality of the images do not detract from the story. With nine players, the 3-by-3 Zoom grid turns out to be a powerfully expressive element. This is, after all, a play that consists almost entirely of girls caught in the act of growing up, using their pack identity — the team is called the Wolves — as a kind of privacy screen behind which they become individuals. What at first appears to be a single organ, like an insect’s compound eye, turns out, upon Zoom inspection, to be many.

The cast is excellent, landing the jokes no less than the pathos. But what really stands out in this virtual production is the way DeLappe had already shaped the audience’s experience to parallel the girls’. We only slowly discern specific lives within the undifferentiated mass of faces and jerseys. (Amusingly, for Zoom purposes, the jerseys have their numbers facing front instead of back.) As we are discovering them, they are discovering themselves.

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning” is a much more despairing play, less about discovery than about deepening confusion. In a series of painful confrontations, it tests the moral clarity of its main characters: four young adults associated with a deeply conservative Catholic college in Wyoming. What it finds, over the course of a night, soon after a protester was killed at a white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Va., is that they all struggle with beliefs they can no longer make sense of.

To pack so much pain and intensity into a Zoom grid would have been an aesthetic monstrosity, a Greek drama on the set of “The Hollywood Squares.” So when the Wilma’s planned stage production was, like “The Wolves,” shut down, its director, Blanka Zizka, who is also one of the company’s four co-artistic directors, decided instead to recreate “Heroes” as a digital, site-specific production. For two and a half weeks, the actors and crew quarantined together in five Airbnb rentals in the Pocono Mountains. The backyard of one of the Airbnbs was their set; the night was their soundscape, complete with dying crickets that ruined takes.

The play is so tightly written and so specific about its characters that I was not surprised to find the finished production, at least at first, closely mirroring Danya Taymor’s superb original staging for Playwrights Horizons.

But very soon, when the camera panned up from the scene of the four young people drinking and jawing and wrangling over faith to a shot of Orion in a massively starry sky, Zizka’s version, the first since Taymor’s, took on a completely different aspect, more cosmic if perhaps less personal than the original. The virtual experience of a real place — as opposed to what live theater gives you: a real experience of a virtual place — bends the mind toward abstractions.

The play works beautifully that way too, and Zizka clearly relished the new opportunities that filming offered. Reverse angles and close-ups vary the composition and also provide the chance, unavailable in theater, to tell a story partly by showing how characters are listening. “Theater audiences will only look at who’s speaking,” Zizka said.

The downside? “The theater is not a building, it’s people — actors and audiences confronting each other,” she continued. “But now that the play is running, it’s lonely. I have no idea what anyone is feeling.”

Well, I know what I was feeling: once again shattered. And the good news for “Heroes,” as for “The Wolves,” is that pandemic productions as fine as these will keep shattering audiences until they can reassemble to confront live theater again.

The Wolves
Available on demand through Dec. 20; philadelphiatheatercompany.org

Heroes of the Fourth Turning
Available on demand through Dec. 13; wilmatheater.org