David Lindsay-Abaire, author of the most-produced play in America this season, is sitting in a Brooklyn coffee shop, marveling at his excellent fortune.

It isn’t a mere five or six professional theaters across the nation that are staging “Good People,” which tells of a working-class single mother from Boston who runs into an ex, now a well-heeled physician. No, it’s an astonishing 17 of them.

Chicago’s Steppenwolf, Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, Seattle Rep and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles are among the high-profile companies mounting their own productions of the work, which ran at Manhattan Theatre Club on Broadway in the winter and spring of 2011.

“Good People” is receiving such blanket national theatrical coverage that Lindsay-Abaire, 43, says he can’t hope to see all of the productions. It’s an enviable position for a mid-career dramatist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his previous Broadway work, the 2006 “Rabbit Hole,” and will receive royalties this year, many times over.

And still, for all the value in first-rate theater that “Good People” stands for, this example of copycat programming raises some questions about the creative health of the regional theater movement.

“Good People,” after all, is not the only play of recent Broadway vintage suddenly showing up on the marquees of major nonprofit theaters all at once.

Several other plays that ran on Broadway in the past few years, including “Clybourne Park,” “Other Desert Cities,” “The Mountaintop” and “Time Stands Still” are also being produced by 10 or more companies around the United States in the 2012-13 season.

In fact, according to the Theatre Communications Group, the trade organization for America’s nonprofit theaters, nine of the 11 most-produced plays this season opened on Broadway over the past four years. Only “The Whipping Man” (from off-Broadway) and “A Raisin in the Sun” (from 1959) don’t have newly minted Broadway pedigrees.

“I have to remember I’m programming for a D.C. audience and not for the artistic directors of America,” said David Muse, artistic director of Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., one of nine in the nation producing one of those 11, Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “The Motherf–er With the Hat,” this season. “On the other hand, I hold onto this idea of regional theaters as art houses, and wanting to have distinct artistic identities. Like with many things, it’s just a question of balance.”

Varied reasons

It is, of course, far easier to schedule a play that has performed well elsewhere, than to subject a company perpetually to the rigors of otherwise untested work. Some theaters say there is an absolute obligation to get these works in front of their audiences.

“I think it’s the responsibility of theater companies to do a play like ‘Good People,’ the same way a play like ‘Red’ has to be done in different parts of the country,” said Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena Stage in Washington, where the Tony Award-winning “Red” played a year ago to enthusiastic reviews and crowds.

“Good People” is a wise and funny play that asks pertinent questions about social responsibility, about what specifically those who rise from humble origins might give back to those they left behind.

But it must also be noted that not merely proven critical or popular appeal propels these dramas onto the top 10. Many of these plays are also small-cast pieces, relatively inexpensive to produce.

“Good People” has six characters; Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities” and “Motherf–er” five. One of the reasons Matthew Lopez’s Civil War-set “Whipping Man” – produced last spring by Theater J and Baltimore’s Centerstage – is being done in 14 productions during the 2012-13 season: It’s performed by a cast of three.

Ryan Rilette, recently installed as producing artistic director of Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Md., says sometimes a play is selected for practical as much as artistic concerns, as happened on occasion in his previous job as producing director of the Bay Area’s Marin Theatre Company.

“The last show I did there, ‘God of Carnage,’ is one of those plays,” Rilette said of Yasmina Reza’s Broadway comedy – done in an astounding 23 regional professional productions in the 2011-12 season.

“It’s great and everyone wants to do it: It’s four characters and a single set. We did well with it. But it wasn’t one of our best-selling shows. My experience with those big-name shows is they’re not the runaway hits, but they’re solid.”

What’s more worrying for some is the notion that ubiquitous plays, no matter how strong, push to the sidelines efforts to invigorate the proliferation of work by playwrights struggling for slots at regional theaters.

Finding balance

Studio’s Muse says that there’s a difference between “importing exactly what you saw in New York” and “when you see something and you say, ‘Wouldn’t that be interesting if you can do that in a smaller space, and the design were less mechanical and performances were more human-scaled?’ ” He says he believes that that’s the inherent challenge in Studio taking on a widely produced “Motherf–er.”

A more reliable equilibrium between these impulses seems to be what Suilebhan advocates. “There’s no doubt that those shows will sell better, and that’s hard to argue with especially in troubling financial times,” he said. “At the same time, our theaters are not-for-profits; they have to have a responsibility to the community in which they live.”

Perceptions of how much more marketable a play of any notoriety might be by virtue of who wrote it is debatable: Lindsay-Abaire is nowhere close to a household name. He views the success of “Good People,” which won a Tony for Frances McDormand, chiefly as a function of its social relevance. It chronicles the confrontation between a woman who has not been able to move beyond menial jobs and a former lover who’s found material and career satisfaction.

“I think it’s tapping into the national dialogue that’s happening right now, about class mentality, about whether we owe anything to the people we’ve passed along the way,” observed Lindsay-Abaire, who grew up in working-class South Boston, the son of a fruit peddler. “Have I earned this spot? Do I have anyone to thank beside myself? That’s exactly what was going on during this election.”