On the same day, in the same city, with essentially the same ethos, two Richards are premiering avant-garde calls-to-arms. Richard Foreman, with more than 38 years in the theater, and Richard Maxwell (barely 38 years old), each opened a new show on Thursday. Though their productions look wildly different on the stage, Messrs. Maxwell and Foreman share an aesthetic that has been called “post-dramatic,” largely because of its cold shoulder for accessible emotion. In both cases, the Richards are stripping down their already lean approaches, looking for new ways to undermine convention.

Another shared quality? The tough time the Richards offer for the antsy audience member. Mr. Maxwell set a record for walkouts at BAM when he staged his “Henry IV Part I” two years ago (ballpark estimates set it at a fifth of the house), and even Foreman regulars can look a little glazed after an hour of his buzzes and thuds. Just as theater has done since before Aristotle started noticing, their work calls up deep emotion. But these guys like to make their audiences feel helplessness, boredom, and nervousness as well as, say, joy and catharsis.

As directors who replace emotive acting technique with deadpan delivery and the “drive” of a play with nearly hypnotic repetitions, neither Mr. Maxwell nor Mr. Foreman has much of a problem with alienating his audience. Mr. Maxwell once cavalierly confessed, “I don’t have the capacity to orchestrate something that is going to elicit a specific reaction from an audience,” claiming to arrive at his monotonic style simply by following his process. Mr. Foreman, however, cops to weeding out a certain type of audience in highly articulate, academically quotable manifestos.Currently, his director’s notes peg his work as “elitist” – tending “to speak of powerful hidden things and energies,in language that is isomorphic with those hidden things and energies, rather than in the language of daily life.” Basically, his dogged nonemotion makes us tense, and he exploits that tension.Call it postdramatic stress.

Long before last year, Mr. Foreman’s bag of tricks had become familiar – the black and white strings, blazing lights, obsessively ornamented sets, and beheaded Kewpie dolls. His pieces were far from interchangeable,but he had retained a single aesthetic for decades. Then,when he announced last year that he was hanging up his theater spurs, downtown panicked. He was the reluctant papa of experimentalism,a legend, muse, and active coach for much of the off-off scene. Luckily, he was only changing gears. His abandonment of “theater” for “multimedia” was little more than semantics: “Zomboid” looks suspiciously like theater that has discovered video design.

Gone are the rich, nearly rococo mechanics. Now the action takes place against a gigantic projected backdrop. Simple figures in tableaux stare down at the human (and occasionally donkeycentric) drama below.The giant figures on the screen, often blindfolded but al ways calm, seem like gods or caryatids, ideals when compared to the peripatetic silliness below.

One of the delights of the pre-multimedia Foreman was its density. Last year’s piece,”The Gods Are Pounding My Head AKA a Lumberjack Messiah,” specifically complained that richness of knowledge (being steeped in poetry and history) is out, and media-savvy “pancake people” are in. It was a cry against being stretched thin and thinking simply. Having mourned complexity’s passing, Mr.Foreman seems ready to make us feel its loss. His design shift, from sculptural clutter to large, clean, two-dimensional images, binds us even more tightly to the last baroque thing we have left: his text.

Mr. Maxwell, on the other hand, isn’t making such a dramatic break from his mannerist style (what Margot Ebling called his Theater of Downtime.) He still writes intentionally banal dialogue, as affectless and uninvolving as an overheard phone conversation. But in “The End of Reality,” a numb 100 minutes about security guards, he too gives up some of his favorite props. In his Obie Award-winning “House,” his set meticulously re-created a dank basement; in 2004’s “Good Samaritans” it was a photo-realistic recreation of a homeless shelter. Now he only sketches at the notion of “set,” simply using blue tape and a couple of tables. He also loses the amateurishly rendered pop songs that once stood in for emotional release. Just like Foreman, he seems less and less interested in letting his audience off the hook.

No one has ever managed to convincingly mimic Mr. Foreman (perhaps because even he calls his work “schizophrenic”), but Mr. Maxwell has a number of stylistic brethren. Andrew Bujalski’s film “Funny Ha Ha”finds the same humor in nonprofessionals underplaying, while director Pavol Liska echoes Mr. Maxwell’s dead-eyed shtick, just in more literary surroundings. All of them are in some way children of Mr. Foreman, who in turn is an artistic descendant of that dragon Gertrude Stein. She would certainly approve of both Richards, pushing her theory of the present moment to its excruciating utmost. This week, we have a chance to see how these punishing aesthetics will continue to demand our patience and effort. Stein once said, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” But for the audience of said genius? We’ve got to sit around, listening, and working very, very hard.