Oh, that cheery Samuel Beckett. It turns out the poster child for existential despair, the great dramatizer of paralysis, self-abnegation, and the loneliness of language, was a great sucker for clowns. Certainly, his most famous characters, the boys who wait for Godot, walk around with their pants falling down doing some very hammy shtick.

At least, that’s what the Worth Theater Company wants you to think. So when Jeff Cohen wanted to direct “Happy Days,” he didn’t look for a woman with angst writ large upon her. He looked to Lea Delaria. Ms. Delaria, famous for being a leading comic presence on Broadway, brings a brassy, hacha-cha attitude to her Winnie, broadening her humor and flattening her vowels. It’s a wonderful idea, but only intermittently successful.

Winnie spends her “Happy Days” buried to her waist in a giant mound under a blazing sun. Unable to do much more than reach into her purse for entertainment, Winnie must make the hours pass with an increasingly meaningless set of routines. But a good housewife wouldn’t wake up without doing her makeup (almost all gone now), packing and unpacking her bag, and waking her husband.

Winnie keeps up a stream of cheerful, chin-up chatter to Willie (David Greenspan), who seems to live somewhere on the backside of her pile. His torso emerges occasionally, naked but for its straw boater and protective handkerchief, but his own nose is buried – in the newspaper. By the second act, Winnie has sunk into the dirt up to her neck. Her bouncy attitude is showing strain at the edges; she seems desperate for Willie’s response. But when he finally works his way ’round to her, he seems awfully interested in a pistol she has near her earthbound chin.

Beckett paints a weirdly realistic portrait of a long, habit-clogged relationship. The subtle murderousness, the inertia, and its inexorable march to the grave all ring true, despite the absurdist circumstances. But comedy is harder than dying, goes the old theater adage, and in this case it might be even harder than disappearing into a pit of debris.

Humor doesn’t do well in a dead room – Ms. Delaria had a silent bunch of audience members to contend with when I saw it. She has the chops, is light on her feet, and showed the same unsinkable spirit that her character does. When an audience member started snoring, she even managed to tweak a delivery into a powerful shout: theater as literal wake-up call. But her bag of tricks, unlike Winnie’s, has a bottom.

Beckett’s premise doesn’t allow for anything other than unstinting magnetism from its actress, and that Ms. Delaria does not have. Mr. Greenspan gets the maximum mileage out of his grunts, but the show is basically a two act monologue. “Happy Days” functions both as paean to human resilience and fugue for its mindless ability to persevere. Ms. Delaria tries to mug her way through it.

By making her pile out of crushed concrete rather than earth, designer David Gordon and Mr. Cohen seem to be saying that Winnie’s disaster might be less domestic, more social. But these “Happy Days” don’t convince on a smaller scale, and so cannot on a larger one.

***

At 59E59, the admirable stack of theaters built by Elysabeth Kleinhans, good intentions usually pave the path to marvelous things. Ms. Kleinhans’s spaces are accessible to both touring shows and local talent; they offer gorgeous accommodation and impressive exposure. They always seem to have a steady stream of inter esting projects on offer, such as the valuable “Brits off-Broadway” festival, a highlight of last year.

Thus the most recent offering, produced by Ms. Kleinhans own Animated Theaterworks Inc., disappoints. Mark Sickman’s “Taxi to Jannah” comes off a bit like the Muslim answer to “Everybody Loves Raymond.”There’s Nasruddin (Amir Darvish) the fast-talking, sweet-natured taxi driver who dreams of building a new mosque; his long-suffering wife (Regina Bartkoff), who repeats “Nasruddin, you’re a madman!”; and a stingy father-in-law (Mueen Jahan Ahmad) who shoots him down at every opportunity.

Will Nasruddin get his mosque up to code before the city closes him down? Will he win the respect of his basketball-obsessed son Omar? And will he manage to turn a suicidal cab passenger into a firm friend? Don’t let me ruin the suspense.

Director Donald Douglass and his cast tap dance as fast as they can with this material. Natasha A. Williams, as the city inspector, gets some laughs by going over the top, and Mr. Darvish never lets his desperate grin waver. But as a piece of dramatic writing, the play doesn’t approach the bar.

It does, however, address an underserved portion of the public. Part of the “Immigrant Voices Project,” “Taxi to Jannah” takes an after-school-special vibe and puts it onstage. It hammers home obvious lessons about tolerance, but it also contains some lovely, rare detail about Islamic practice. “Taxi” reflects its community, and in doing so provides a service. Certainly judging from the number of in-show snacks and answered cell phones, the audience this Sunday was different than the usual ones.

“Happy Days” until March 13 (136 E. 13th Street, 212-279-4200).

“Taxi to Jannah” until February 20 (59 E. 59th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-279-4200).