Karaoke pops up as an explicit stage element in Queens Boulevard, the second production (in November), a romantic play with music about the most multiethnic of New York’s boroughs. The final installment of his season will be Paradise Park, a carnivalesque pastiche of Americana that displays Mee’s Dadaist cut-’n’-paste tendencies at their wildest. All three shows are New York premieres.

“Chuck always talks about having three distinct areas,” says Signature artistic director James Houghton. “He has his spin on the Greeks, there are his romantic plays, and he also works with the collage structure. So we’re able to offer one of each over the course of the season, create a context for the whole body.”

Houghton’s physical reference is metaphorical, but such images are unavoidable when discussing Mee. As a 14-year-old in Illinois, the writer contracted polio, which left him paralyzed. Through force of will, he got his legs back and today moves around on a pair of aluminum canes. Mee draws a connection between this traumatic event and his dramaturgical approach. “I like mosaics, juxtapositions where you’re not trying to smooth over the edges—like a stained-glass window with different chunks, rather than oil painting,” he says. “It feels more like the strategy of Robert Rauschenberg. Partly I like it because it startles me, but it also feels like a deep expression of how my life has happened to me.”

When Bogart first saw this bold smash-up tactic in Martha Clarke’s Vienna: Lusthaus (1986), it was a revelation. “I realized, Oh, he’s working with the aesthetics of sampling,” she recalls. “And this was before the music industry was into it.” Subsequently, Bogart went on to stage several of Mee’s plays (most recently the Joseph Cornell–inspired Hotel Cassiopeia, which comes to BAM October 9). She marvels at his willingness to let a director invent. “When Chuck wrote bobrauschenbergamerica, he had a whole scene and all it said was, ‘A beating occurs,’ ” Bogart says. “So I turned to Chuck, ‘What do you mean?’ He just shrugged. What ended up happening is that an actor took out a garbage can, put it on Astroturf and beat it with a baseball bat until it was a crumpled piece of aluminum.”

Sounds like potentially abrasive stuff for people used to the Signature presenting canonical names such as August Wilson or Sam Shepard. Luckily, Time Warner has renewed its sizable grant to the organization, allowing it to offer $20 tickets all season. Maybe younger audiences, who marinate in multimedia disjunctions all day through websites, TV and music, will be able to appreciate Mee’s channel-surfed world better than older subscribers. Now they probably can afford a seat.

And who knows? Perhaps the genially subversive Mee may still get around to penning a so-called well-made play. “I’m sure this is wrong of me, but I haven’t chosen a way of writing that I do all the time,” he admits with a smile. “Some are partly plotted, others seem to be collaged from random stuff. I kind of work the range.”

Iphigenia 2.0 is at the Signature Theatre Company through Sept 30.