The very best off-off-Broadway shows aren’t those in which an artist makes his audience forget the cramped quarters and the leaky roof. Sometimes, shows need empty stages, and size and razzle would just be corrupting influences. When performers make magic out of nothing but bare boards, they remind us of theater’s essential miracle.

The two-clown show currently at HERE Arts Center, “All Wear Bowlers,” fits brilliantly into the black box theater’s confines, turning the leanness of the environment into a partner in comedy. “All Wear Bowlers” also purrs with excellent sleight-of-hand, tumbles about with infectious good-humor, and overflows with clever tonal shifts.

On a screen at the back of the stage, an old-fashioned film jerks along its sepia way. On an empty field there stands a craggy tree, and on the craggy tree there stands a man. He hops down to join his buddy, and the two of them waddle Chaplinesquely towards us. After a brief, quiet disagreement (this is a silent film), one of them comes running full tilt toward the audience. Lights flare, and before we know it, Earnest (Geoff Sobelle) is with us in the flesh.

He and Wyatt (Trey Lyford) have a fine old time bopping not only between the stage and the audience but between the screen and the stage: If Wyatt cartwheels down a hill in the movie, he steps out from behind the screen with straw in his teeth. But soon their way into the film is barred, and they have to find a way to escape a whole theater full of people waiting to be entertained.

At the entertaining, they do a bangup job. Eggs play a prominent part in their bits, as they emerge by the dozens from poor Wyatt’s mouth and dance about on Earnest’s briefcase. The clowns also have a fuzzy sense of boundaries, forever chatting up audience members in order to steal their chairs, or trading things that should be kept separate – like limbs. I remained unscathed, but the reviewer in front of me nearly lost his notebook and his wife to them.

The usual irritation of fourth-wall violations never sets in, however: These two have perfected Buster Keaton’s lovability as well as the feats of legerdemain, so you’ll forgive them just about anything.

Their attempts to escape the audience proves difficult for the two; while having an adorable time pretending to be a monster stomping on Tokyo, they also conjure up a locked room scenario worthy of Sartre. They are charming and disarming in service of a larger, more poignant picture. That is why even their goofiest buffoonery can’t be dismissed.

The duo stacks up to its many influences: There is a Magritte homage, the tree is an unsubtle Beckett quote, and the routines reference plenty of Laurel and Hardy. The seams don’t show, though, and Mr. Lyford and Mr. Sobelle sneak a surprisingly existential perspective into their spit-takes.

Director Aleksandra Wolska has an uncanny sense for the life of a bit – she has the team changing directions at the moment a joke loses its novelty. For a non-existent set, Jarek Trusczynski has certainly designed a marvelous playing space, one that keeps some of its silliest cards close to its chest. Tara Webb’s costumes have all the elegance you could ask for, as does Randy “Igleu” Glickman’s streamlined lighting design and James Sugg’s sound.

But the crowning production glory has to go to Michael Glass’s film (scored by Michael Friedman), which somehow splices Chaplin to Bunuel with aplomb. It’s just this mix of traditions that makes “All Wear Bowlers” such a joyful, skipping step on the road of existential clowning. Hats off to them all.

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Meanwhile, at La MaMa, the old cliché that “nothing stays the same like the avant-garde” proves its truth once more. The genre that mixes media, fractured identities, and broad, pop-cultural winks to the audience has been around for decades, so it’s not as avant as it once was. But it should have at least been around long enough for its practitioners to perfect it.

Not long enough apparently for Richard Schechner’s “YokastaS,” a deconstruction of Oedipus’s ill-starred mother/wife, which limps along for many reasons. First, there’s the uneasy script melange by Saviana Stanescu and Mr. Schechner, which mixes comedy (a slap-fight between Phaedra and Medea) and real-life tragedy (a sampling of Andrea Yates’s testimony after she drowned her children.) Then there’s the technical shabbiness, from an atrocious computer slide show to inconsistent acting. Finally – and this is not a misprint – Oedipus himself has a gigantic rubber foot.

So, in many ways, the show is lame.

Mr. Schechner splits Jocasta (or Yokasta) into her four ages – adolescent (Jennifer Lim), angry young woman (Phyllis Johnson), happy wife (Rachel Bowditch), and mature survivor (Daphne Gaines). He plays the scenario for yuks, with the women appearing on talk shows to discuss their feelings about their particular Greek tragedy.

There are some laughs here, but they grind on into inconsequentiality. This project has been worked and reworked for years, so perhaps the profundity just become too exhausting to sustain. In any event, this Yokasta doesn’t need the various deaths tragedians have written for her – no noose, no dagger – she just suffocates under the weight of some very dead ideas.

“All Wear Bowlers” until March 12 (145 Avenue of the Americas, at Spring Street, 212-868-4444).

“YokastaS” until February 27 (74A E. 4th Street, between Bowery and Second Avenue, 212-352-3101).