Not many people head off to their opening night — at a 99-seat off-Broadway theater — fewer than 12 hours after being nominated for four Academy Awards.

Ethan Coen shares credit, along with his older brother, Joel, for directing, writing, (pseudonymously) editing, and producing “No Country for Old Men.” What could possibly kill that kind of buzz?

Well …

Just in case the pointedly expectation-lowering title “Almost an Evening” wasn’t enough of a tipoff, Mr. Coen’s gifts for loquacious yet crisp dialogue and subtly screw-tightening narrative are all but absent in this plodding trilogy of playlets. Burnished here and there by flashes of wit and by a shockingly overqualified cast, “Almost an Evening” struggles in vain to take the Coens’ genially dyspeptic worldview and encapsulate it into bite-size morsels of existentialism.

In “Waiting,” the opening skit, Nelson (Joey Slotnick) finds himself in a generic waiting room with nothing to occupy him but two dingy magazines and a curt receptionist (Mary McCann). It doesn’t take him long to realize that the room has no doors. The subsequent realizations, abetted and sometimes refuted by a series of ineffectual middle-manager types, take a few hundred thousand years to sink in.

It’s “No Exit” meets “The Office,” with several jokey flourishes added to little effect by director Neil Pepe. And while Jordan Lage is quite funny as the most forthcoming of Nelson’s inquisitors, Mr. Slotnick compresses several epochs’ worth of frustration into about 15 minutes by doing more or less exactly what you’d expect. With nothing in the text to provide any traction, Mr. Slotnick sort of slides through eternity. This undifferentiated quality speaks to a problem in all three of the short plays. The Coens have always imbued their marginal characters with as much oddball piquancy as their lead roles: John Turturro’s characters in “Miller’s Crossing” and “The Big Lebowski” are every bit as memorable as his Barton Fink. But with all three plays in “Almost an Evening” coming and going in well under 90 minutes, Mr. Coen neglects to come to grips with even his ostensible protagonists.

On a stage filled with earnestly quirky characters, people such as Nelson are the quirkily earnest characters.

The same holds true for One (Jonathan Cake), the conflicted British superspy at the center of the second play, “Four Benches.” After a cloak-and-daggers operation goes awry in a New York steam room, resulting in the death of a good ol’ boy from Texas, the nattily dressed One realizes the limits of his icy efficiency. This results in a crisis of conscience and a radical change of venue.

The idea of a suave 007 type seeking solace in a Texas sauna has an agreeable kick to it — it’s the sort of thing you might expect to see in a Coen brothers film — and Mr. Cake’s reserve co-exists intriguingly with his urge to find something “warm and human and sweaty and real.” And of all the evening’s (sorry, the almost evening’s) supporting players, J.R. Horne makes the most memorable impression as the dead Texan’s unimpressed father. Mr. Pepe miscalculates badly by staging the first sauna scene with an audience-engulfing glut of acrid stage fog, but at least a path toward something risky and, yes, human can be spotted through the murk.

Mr. Coen’s longest and shaggiest piece is also his most misguided. Mr. Coen begins “Debate” by devising a good-god/bad-god dialogue for two deities. First comes F. Murray Abraham’s Hebrew Bible iteration, God Who Judges, who tears into secularism, sin, and pierced nipples with profane gusto: “You don’t know the state capitals and you’re gonna decide this moral s–t? No, no. I decide, and I f—ing am that am.” God Who Loves, played by Mark Linn-Baker, then speaks of the self-fulfilling desire for love in painstakingly smoothing tones. The dialectic concludes with two rounds of god-on-god violence. So far, so good, albeit in a cheap-laughs sort of way, complete with a potshot at the Atlantic Theater Company’s spiritual majordomo, David Mamet.

But then, through a series of limp confrontations that would prompt restlessness in a full-length play, Mr. Coen trowels on an overlay of Pirandellian whimsy. The debate was part of a theater piece, you see, and after contriving to assemble one of the performers, a smattering of baffled audience members, a mirthless feminist (played by the off-Broadway goddess Elizabeth Marvel, who must have owed Mr. Coen a huge favor), and an irritable maitre d’ at a local restaurant, the play-within-the-play’s messages unfold with condescending literalness and a surprising tone-deafness for how people actually argue. The finale may not be predictable, but only because few would go to the trouble of predicting something so tired.

A master of clinical precision hankers for a simpler life. He plunks himself down into a new setting, exhibiting far more eagerness than aptitude. The new neighbors stare with a blend of well-wishing and puzzlement before walking away. That is the plot of “Four Benches,” the spy-in-Texas play. It’s also the sad and rather pointless story of “Almost an Evening.” Nobody ever accused Mr. Coen of not having a healthy sense of irony.

Until February 10 (330 W. 16th St., between Eighth and Ninth avenues, 212-279-4200).