THE 70th ANNUAL

TONY AWARDS

On CBS,

Sunday at 8 p.m.

NEW YORK — One of the most stirring moments in the Broadway revival of “The Color Purple’’ arrives when Celie, the long-subjugated wife of a brutal Georgia farmer known to her as Mister, finally summons enough courage to leave him.

Mister predicts she won’t be able to make it in the wider world, then bitingly enumerates the reasons: “You black, you poor, you ugly, you a woman.’’ With rising defiance, Celie, unforgettably portrayed by Cynthia Erivo, sings her reply: “I may be poor. I may be black. I may be ugly. But I’m here!’’

That final word rings out across the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre and, figuratively speaking, all over Broadway, where female protagonists who refuse to allow themselves to be rendered invisible are delivering a similar message this season: We’re here.

In a striking number of plays and musicals vying for Tony Awards on Sunday night, the goal of female characters — prominently including women of color — is to break through and break free, to gain control over their own lives, to make their own choices and determine their own futures.

Coincidentally but notably, Sunday’s Tony ceremony will take place just days after Hillary Clinton became the first woman ever to claim the presidential nomination of a major American political party.

Against the backdrop of that historic breakthrough, it can certainly be argued that the stories Broadway tells about women are still too reliant on abuse, suffering, and loss. There are plenty of other stories to be told, and bolstering the number of women playwrights who are produced each season — still unconscionably low on Broadway — would go a long way toward broadening the frame.

It’s also valid to question whether the racially and ethnically diverse slate of this year’s Tony nominees, which offers such a welcome contrast to the abysmal lack of diversity at the Academy Awards, represents a true turning point. While reporting that more than a third of those nominated for Tonys this year for performances in musicals or plays are actors of color, the Associated Press noted that the 2016-17 season on Broadway “isn’t shaping up to be as diverse as this one.’’

So let’s savor the moment, a moment when the nominees for best play include Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed,’’ which features an all-black cast (including Lupita Nyong’o of “12 Years a Slave’’) and which represents the first Broadway play in which the writer, director, and the entire cast are women.

“Eclipsed’’ is one of several productions in which women try to survive abuse at the hands of men, including “The Color Purple,’’ “Blackbird,’’ and “Waitress,’’ which premiered last year at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater before transferring to Broadway.

Female characters take steps to ensure that their careers, their love lives, and even their personal stories remain in their own hands in a host of other Tony-nominated shows that are otherwise quite varied in tone and subject: “Bright Star,’’ “Fiddler on the Roof,’’ “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,’’ “She Loves Me,’’ and “Shuffle Along, Or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.’’

Even “Hamilton,’’ though primarily focused on Alexander Hamilton and other founding fathers, features two compelling women who figure large in the story: Angelica Schuyler, who becomes Hamilton’s confidant, and her sister Eliza, who marries Hamilton, remains with him despite his infidelity, outlives him by 50 years, and carries on his legacy. It is Eliza who has the last word, almost literally, in “Hamilton.’’

A number of Tony-nominated plays and musicals, including revivals, involve the struggles and solidarity of vividly drawn female characters who seek to overcome arrogant, deeply planted male assumptions and prerogatives.

In the musical “Bright Star,’’ co-created by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, a female editor of a literary journal in mid-1940s North Carolina determinedly sets out to find the child who was literally wrested from her arms two decades earlier by her father. (Unknown to her, another man, after gaining possession of her baby, took an even more breathtakingly callous step.)

In Bartlett Sher’s revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,’’ Tevye the dairyman assumes that patriarchal authority is part of the “Tradition’’ he extols early in the show, the set of unquestioned customs that govern life in the small Russian village of Anatevka in 1905. But one after another, Tevye’s three eldest daughters defy him by marrying for love rather than submit to arranged unions, choosing a timorous tailor, a political radical, and a man who is not Jewish.

Some of the most memorable moments in Tony-nominated productions help to illuminate the relationships among women, revealing how much those relationships matter as the protagonists fight for autonomy, dignity, or freedom — sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

In “Waitress’’ — helmed by ART artistic director Diane Paulus — a waitress named Jenna (Jessie Mueller) confronts a dilemma when she learns she is pregnant, following drunken sex with her abusive leech of a husband, Earl.

Another waitress, the no-nonsense Becky, tells Jenna to end her marriage. “Hon, don’t hold yourself to vows and promises you made when you were too young to know who the hell [Earl] really was! . . . Do that baby a favor and leave his sorry ass.’’ When Jenna replies that “He’d never let me,’’ Becky’s response is immediate and unequivocal: “Honey, it’s not up to him.’’

The lines of female solidarity are decidedly more tangled, and the final outcome decidedly more equivocal, in “Eclipsed,’’ Gurira’s drama about the captive “wives’’ of a rebel officer during the Liberian civil war, which serves as a portrait of the trauma, especially rape, that has been suffered by women in wartime in all times and places.

Three very different women try, in very different ways, to guide a 15-year-old girl who falls into rebel hands. The maternal Helena, who has been a captive of the officer for many years, hides the girl under a metal tub (a tactic that eventually falls short). The fierce Maima, an ex-captive-turned-soldier, tells the girl that picking up a gun and joining the rebels in their fight is the only way to avoid being abused — even if it means helping to consign other women and girls to that fate. Rita, a leader in a women’s peace organization, urges the girl to go with her, presumably to help build a better future for her country.

Jessica Lange both haunts and commands the stage as the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone in the revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.’’ Mary won’t let her husband James (Gabriel Byrne) forget the price she has paid for loving a man whose acting career forced her to live in hotel rooms rather than a real home — and whose stinginess led him to hire the cheapest doctor he could find when she was giving birth, leading to her addiction. But it is when Lange’s Mary is talking to the only other woman onstage, the maid Cathleen (Colby Minifie), that we sense the true depth of her grief at the lost possibilities of her life.

Even though the story line of “Shuffle Along’’ revolves around the four male creators of a landmark early ’20s musical, a singer named Lottie Gee, portrayed by Audra McDonald, is the most compelling figure in the show. While definitely possessed of a star’s vanity and ego, Lottie surprises us with her generosity in coaching a talented newcomer named Florence Mills (Adrienne Warren) on how to express herself in performance, and in Lottie’s vulnerability as she weighs the tradeoffs between her career and her love for the married Eubie Blake (Brandon Victor Dixon).

Sisterhood is powerful in “The Color Purple,’’ even though Celie is cruelly separated from her actual sister by Mister for most of the show. Her love for the nightclub singer Shug Avery, whose spirit is as free as Celie’s is cramped and confined, is what helps awaken her from subservience. Celie is further inspired by the example and the exhortations of Sofia, the fiery, take-no-guff wife of Mister’s son, Harpo. Sofia pays a terrible price for her independence, but her spirit is restored, in a kind of karmic repayment, at the moment when Celie finally stands up to Mister.

After Celie makes a successful venture into entrepreneurship by designing her own line of custom-made trousers, all three women celebrate in song, capped by Celie’s triumphant cry: “Look who’s wearing the pants now!’’

THE 70th ANNUAL TONY AWARDS

On CBS, Sunday at 8 p.m.

TONY AWARDS, Page N5

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.