If an actor playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream comes to the director worried that the audience just won't believe it when he wakes up with an ass's head, the director can offer him some reassurance based on past audience behaviour; but who knows if an audience will believe some totally made-up modern fiction?
 
In Shining Souls I wrote a contemporary play whose heroine has a backstory like a Greek tragedy, and whose homeless hero is so at the edges of his own consciousness he can scarcely comprehend himself. There are also two characters called Billy, both in love with the heroine who can't make up her mind between them.

It is not social realism.

Luckily for me each production of Shining Souls has had actors who didn't waste any time discussing the play in any kind of cerebral way.  Always they have dived into the fictional situations without any of the throat-clearing and punditry that usually characterize the first days of rehearsal.

Just as well.  Though the drama is set in a gritty working-class part of Glasgow, the action is, in the broadest sense of the word, religious.  Roughly in the way Greek tragedy is.  It's like the characters are involved in a ritual or something, driving the play towards a moment of transformation.  The language is a very heightened demotic that's transfigured by the yearnings of the characters and the extremity of the situation.

Weirdly, audiences accept it without any quarrel.