New Yorkers will be seeing a lot of Charles Mee this year. The Signature Theatre, where he is the playwright-in-residence, will offer three world premieres, beginning next week with “Iphigenia 2.0,” directed by Tina Landau. In October, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of its Next Wave Festival, will present “Hotel Cassiopeia,” based on the life of the artist Joseph Cornell and created in collaboration with the director Anne Bogart and the SITI Company.

Mr. Mee’s plays are mosaics of cultural fragments, with plots borrowed from the Greeks or Shakespeare and text lifted from sources as disparate as Homer, Hannah Arendt, the Internet and Vogue magazine. But they are far from being cerebral postmodern experiments. They are full of music, dance, and stunning visual spectacle. And they express a view of life, as shattered and disorienting, that is deeply personal.

In a recent interview in his kitchen in Brooklyn, Mr. Mee, 68, cited the influence of visual artists who have practiced forms of collage, such as Cornell, Max Ernst, and Robert Rauschenberg. Mr. Mee spent many years writing history books, including “Meeting at Potsdam” and “The Marshall Plan,” and is used to quoting primary sources to make an argument. He also sees us as products of our diverse collective culture.

“In the world today there’s not one story that’s privileged over all others,” he said, “and what we’re really trying to do is find out how to live in a world with many stories, many values and points of view, and how to live from day to day happy and at peace.”

In 1953, when Mr. Mee was 14 and an avid football player, he contracted polio and nearly died. His legs never regained their full strength, and he still walks with crutches. As he explained in his 1999 memoir, “A Nearly Normal Life,” the possibility of sudden and random events such as his illness affected how Mr. Mee chose to write.

“Intact people should write intact books with sound narratives built of sound paragraphs that unfold with a sense of dependable cause and effect, solid structures you can rely on,” he wrote. “That is not my experience of the world.”

“Iphigenia 2.0” is his adaptation of Euripides’s “Iphigenia at Aulis,” in which Agamemnon must decide whether to sacrifice his daughter so that his ships can depart for Troy. Mr. Mee said he delayed writing this one for a long time, since he always had daughters living at home. But his youngest daughter is going to college in September. Now, he said, “I thought I could do this.”

“Queens Boulevard (the musical),” which will be directed by Davis McCallum, is inspired by a Kathakali play and follows an interracial couple on their wedding day. “Paradise Park” is a collage set in a phantasmagoric amusement park. The director, Daniel Fish, described it as being about “the compulsion people have to escape their daily lives, whether through the fantasy of an amusement park, or the simulation of an exotic event, or through a love relationship.”

Directing one of Mr. Mee’s plays means dealing with music and dance and figuring out how to achieve the visual effects and the sometimes wild physical melees that he writes into the script. “He’ll say, ‘A man walks onstage with his hand on fire,'” Mr. McCallum said. “And you’re reading the play, and you think, ‘That’s great!’ And then you have to think, how can you do that and make it safe and repeatable?”

Mr. Mee’s plays share an attention to love — usually romantic love, though not always, as with “Hotel Cassiopeia,” which poignantly depicts Cornell’s love for his disabled brother. Mr. Mee’s own romantic life has been complex and fractured, like his plays: After three failed marriages, he is currently married to an actress, Michi Barall, 36.

In his memoir Mr. Mee described how, while he was in the hospital as a teenager, his English teacher brought him a copy of Plato’s “Symposium.” It was his introduction to the Greeks.

Mr. Mee thinks it was also his teacher’s way of saying she loved him. She was a shy woman, who lived with another female teacher at the school. “We considered these two women a couple of old maids,” he told The New York Sun. “But if you look back on it, you have to think, maybe these were women who understood they were outsiders in love. When I got polio, maybe [she] thought, ‘Now he’s an outsider, too.'”

Mr. McCallum described Mr. Mee as incredibly generous, noting that he allows people to download all of his plays free from his Web site, www.charlesmee.com. “If some university writes him an e-mail and says, ‘Hey, I want to do a production of your play in Bucharest, he’ll say, ‘That’s great, what are you thinking of?'” Mr. McCallum said.

Mr. Mee has been the recipient of substantial generosity, too. In the late ’90s, his close friend Richard Fisher, the former chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, and his wife Jeanne Donovan Fisher, agreed to start a producing company, True Love Productions, to support Mr. Mee’s playwriting. Mr. Fisher died in 2004, but his widow continues to support him.

When Mr. Mee’s friend Stephen Greenblatt, a Harvard professor and the author of “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,” won a $1.5 million Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he didn’t know what to do with it and offered to commission a play from Mr. Mee. Mr. Mee convinced him instead that they should write a play together. Called “Cardenio,” it is based on an alleged lost play of Shakespeare’s, which was discovered in the 18th century, adapted and performed, and then lost again. Mr. Mee and Mr. Greenblatt turn it into a play-within-a-play, inside the frame of a wedding and several mixed-up pairs of young lovers. For those whom the Signature’s season leaves hungry for more, “Cardenio” is being produced at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., next May.