If the moment of national consensus following the terrorist attacks five years ago threatened to stifle artistic expression, the current spirit of discord seems to foster it. That, at least, is the sense one gets when looking at the politically-charged lineup of the Impact Festival, a smorgasbord of art that lands in Manhattan next week. Bad times for the country can be, ironically, good ones for playwrights, filmmakers, and choreographers.

The festival, which is presented by the Culture Project, is 42-day extravaganza of theater, film, dance, music, visual art, and comedy, on themes of human rights and social justice. It opens Tuesday with Eve Ensler’s “The Treatment,” a two-person play about a soldier (played by Ms. Ensler’s adopted son, Dylan McDermott) and a military psychiatrist.

Other offerings include an adaptation by Ariel Dorfman of Kerry Kennedy’s “Speak Truth to Power,” a collection of interviews with people fighting for human rights, and Charles Grodin’s “The Prosecution of Brandon Hein,” about a teenager sentenced to life imprisonment under the felony murder rule. Films focus on United Nation’s peacekeeping, global agribusiness, the civil war in Sierra Leone, and American electoral politics. Weekly debates at the New York Public Library, an exhibit of art about the Gulf Coast, and a “Concert To Close Guantanamo,” benefiting the Center for Constitutional Rights will round out the programming.

So, what is the desired effect –– or impact –– of this outpouring of politically-driven and socially conscious work? The festival’s main goal is to stimulate debate, the producer, Katrin Macmillan said. “We wanted to address this notion of apathy” among Americans, Ms. Macmillan said, speaking of herself and the Culture Project’s artistic director, Allan Buchman. “The reality is that, in general, people don’t vote in this country. They don’t necessarily feel that, if they do, their vote even counts. They don’t feel entitled to know about, let alone react against, the things that are happening,” she said.

In order to engage the audience in debate, Ms. Macmillan and Mr. Buchman have scheduled panels and talk-backs after almost all the performances and screenings. “We needed the festival to have a very distinct flavor of discussion,” she said.

Ms. Macmillan believes that, by capturing the attention of the press, art can have at least an indirect influence on governments and politicians. “I’ve come to understand how important the press’s role is in lobbying governments to address certain issues — and one way to access the press is through arts,” she said. “News can travel from the arts pages into the news pages.”

The artists participating in the festival echoed Ms. Macmillan’s emphasis on stimulating public dialogue. Ms. Ensler, for instance, said she hopes “The Treatment” will make people start holding the government accountable for the bloodshed in Iraq and for scandals like Abu Ghraib. (The soldier in the play was a guard at an American prison in Iraq, and he recounts instances of horrific abuse.) “That would be the big dream,” she said, “to get people to stand up and ask questions and really engage in what’s going on in this country in a serious way, and not just be passive and allow things or take their course.”

Some said their goal is to get an audience to see things from a different perspective, even if just for the length of the play. Billy Yalowitz, the director of “Six Actors In Search of a Plot” — a play by a Palestinian Israeli writer, Mohammed El-Thayer, that is acted by a cast of both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis –– said he believes that art “can, at least temporarily, allow suspension of entrenched habits of mind.” The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, he said, “is a historical conflict where the narrative of the other group is not listened to. In that way it’s a kind of crisis of imagination,” which art can redress.

Other artists emphasized that even political art is still art, the ultimate purpose of which is expression. Laura Poitras, whose film “My Country, My Country,” about the Iraqi elections will close the festival on October 22, made her film not to rouse other Americans from their passivity, but to rouse herself. Her inspiration came from an article by George Packer in the New Yorker in fall 2003. “I was sitting at home late at night just filled with despair about reading the news,” Ms. Poitras said. “The article was just really powerful. As I was reading it, I said, ‘Okay, I’m making a film.'”

She went to Iraq alone in June 2004, hoping to capture in a film the “tragic contradictions” of the war. Her objective was to capture both the difficulty of occupying a country while trying to create a democracy, and the perspective of the people on the ground, including American soldiers, the United Nations, and, of course, Iraqis, trying to find solutions to these contradictions.

She knew she was risking her life, she said, but she felt compelled to go. “It’s hard to describe, because obviously it wasn’t the smartest decision. If you think about it rationally, I had no business being there. I was alone, I didn’t speak Arabic, I had no bureau backing me up. But I felt that there was something that wasn’t being expressed, and that needed to be expressed.”

The drive to make a work of art, then, was not to change the course of the war, but what Ms. Poitras described as “a sort of selfish desire to express something about a situation and to share that with a wider audience.”

Many artists said their aim is not to depress audiences or simply make them angry. It’s to show them that individuals — activists, artists, regular citizens — can speak up and make a difference.

Rob Urbinati, who adapted and will direct “The People Speak” — a dramatization of Howard Zinn’s “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” a collection of primary source writings and speeches by social activists, from Frederick Douglass and Eugene Debs to Cindy Sheehan and Rachel Corrie — said he hopes the play captures some of Mr. Zinn’s genuine, infectious optimism, about the power of individuals to resist.

“I wouldn’t be happy if this play made everyone pissed off,” Mr. Urbinati said. “It’s not what we want.” It should “make them angry and provoke them,” he continued, “but also inspire them.”