The dramatic canon has always adored a nice, juicy perversion of motherhood — think the filicidal Medea; the incestuous Jocasta; even the ruthless Lady Macbeth, with her enduringly jarring mention of having “given suck.”

It makes ample space, too, for mothers who must be escaped by their sons, like the anxious chatterbox Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s autobiographical “The Glass Menagerie” and the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s similarly inspired-by-life “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

And it does love, and love to chastise, a woman like Rose, the hellbent stage mother at the center of “Gypsy.” Since she first arrived on Broadway in 1959, she has been called a termagant, a gargoyle, a monster — and that’s just by reviewers from The New York Times. But as Audra McDonald is proving to devastating effect in George C. Wolfe’s current revival, Rose is deeply human. Always has been.

This time around, she is also part of a subtle social shift: an unusual abundance of forceful, fully drawn mothers seen lately on New York’s larger stages. The current Broadway shows “Cult of Love” and “Eureka Day,” and recent ones including “The Hills of California” and “Suffs,” are interested in a lot more than how those characters traumatize their children, or how far they deviate from the maternal ideal. They might cast long shadows over their girls in particular, yet they are human beings as multidimensional as any man.

Rose, who has been emotionally complex all along, warps her daughters’ 1920s childhoods with the tyrannical ambitions she has for them. But her unyielding exterior was forged for protection against a world that shut her out.

“Well, someone tell me, when is it my turn?” she sings when at last she breaks down. “Don’t I get a dream for myself?”