“Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight!” Zero Mostel warbled in the Stephen Sondheim musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. But in fact, it seems, it’s probably both tragedy and comedy tonight: You can hardly have a comedy without a dash of tragedy to spur the action along. If comedy is the triumph over tragedy, then tragedy, or at least brittle and dangerous complication, has to be somewhere in the tale to be triumphed over. For a comedy to rise and shine, the potential for tragedy has to make its uncomfortable presence felt, like the grain of sand that prompts an oyster to produce a pearl.

Human frailty and foolishness have a lot to do with most any good comedy. A Shakespearean frolic like Much Ado About Nothing is built on misapprehension and conflict and plain bone-headedness, the kind that with just a nudge here and a bad turn there could lead to heartbreak and disaster. A good sitcom like Frasier gets no laughs without the built-in venality and self-obsession of its characters. (“Better them than us,” we think, deluding ourselves with a sense of false superiority.) Romantic comedy, perhaps at its finest in Jane Austen’s slyly funny novels, builds to its eventual triumph by overcoming bad decisions, foolish pride, and potentially deal-breaking prejudices.

Even animal stand-ins for humans get in on the act. Kenneth Grahame’s woodland critters in The Wind and the Willows overcome some pretty deep and human-like frailties (especially the incorrigible Mr. Toad’s) by relying on the healing powers of friendship and community. In the Roadrunner cartoons, Wile E. Coyote is constantly being flattened by an anvil falling from the sky, only to rise again and chase once more after the Roadrunner, never stopping to think that the bird just isn’t worth the physical trauma. And, speaking of birds, the ancient jocular riddle “Why did the chicken cross the road?” carries within it a furtive and potentially deadly counter-question: “Is that chicken about to be squashed by a speeding semi truck?”

Which brings us to a pair of obsessively dark-streaked comedies now playing on Portland theater stages: the fright-show musical comedy Litttle Shop of Horrors, at Triangle Productions!, and Samuel Beckett’s classically tortured comedy Waiting for Godot, a Corrib Theatre production at CoHo Theatre.

Waiting for Godot

The grain of sand in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a huge one: the existential question of the presence or absence of an almighty being or force in the universe. Are we alone? Have we been abandoned? Must we wend our own way through this bewildering thing called life? Is the joke entirely on us? Where is Godot, anyway, and why is it that we feel compelled to wait for him?

Beckett called Godot a “tragicomedy,” which seems right: It’s hard to find another story that so precariously balances its despair and its humor. And for American audiences used to the pronunciation Gud-OH, Corrib’s production, as artistic director Holly Griffith noted in her introductory chat at Friday night’s performance, uses the pronunciation common in Ireland: GOD-oh. If God is in the house, can You please make Yourself known?

Godot is an extremely physical play, and yet its contemplations are largely on a cerebral plane, an examination of the riddles of existence and the unknowability of them. At its best, the play’s rudely physical, baggy-pants comedy shtick plays a brilliant counterpoint to the play’s ideas, confronting them with the realities of what the body feels while the mind is wandering into arcane and abstract places: all of this wondering about the meaning of life, while life is happening in the moment in the form of too-tight shoes and stinky feet, constant trudging, hauling a slave around the countryside with a rope around his neck, the impatient passing-around of hats from character to character. Humans, both seeking and fearing the divine? As Gogo declares at one point, “People are bloody ignorant apes!”

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Corrib’s Godot, directed by Patty Gallagher, is a delight, if the words “delight” and “Beckett” are allowed to be uttered together in the same sentence. If “delight” sounds too frivolous, rather call it a bracing, challenging, enlightening experience. The play’s unhappy wanderers — Vladimir, or Didi, played by Roo Welsh, and Estragon, or Gogo, played by Karl Hanover — meet up with another unhappily entangled pair (Jonathan Cullen as the slavemaster Pozzo and Doren Elias as his sardonically misnamed underling Lucky), and all four, with the able walk-on addition of Max O’Hare as the boy messenger from the absent Godot, do terrific jobs of combining expressively exaggerated physicality with an eloquent mastery of the musicality in the play’s words.

As Didi, Welsh performs throughout the play with book in hand, and that might bother some audience members. It didn’t bother me: Everything about Godot, from the physical to the philosophical, is exaggerated, and I found it easy to imagine that Didi is simply a studious fellow, especially since Welsh, like the other performers, puts such vigor and humor into Didi’s motions and masters the language so well.

One of the secrets of Godot is that the play’s meanings are adaptable to the changing places and times in which it’s presented. In many ways, right now it feels like a response to the incivilities, cultural divisions, and power grabs of contemporary America, as one exchange suggests:

— “We’ve lost our rights!”

— “We got rid of ’em.”

Next year, next decade, next century, the play’s “message” might feel like something very different. Classics tend to be shapeshifters.

And Waiting for Godot is a classic. As entertaining as it can be, it puts demands on its audience, insisting on both alertness and a dollop of patience as it goes through its ritualistic paces. The audience, after all, has to wait for Godot, too: Concentrate on the moment, even as you’re itching for it to move on.

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“Waiting for Godot,” produced by Corrib Theatre, continues through Dec. 15 with performances Thursday-Sunday at CoHo Theatre, 2257 N.W. Raleigh St., Portland. Ticket and schedule information here.

Little Shop of Horrors

It’s always a pleasure to see Little Shop of Horrors back in town, with its delicious absurdities and camped-up characters and catchy score by the team of Howard Ashman (book and lyrics) and composer Alan Menken. Toss in an absurdly attractive, people-chomping Venus Fly Trap variant of a plant, a sadistic dentist with a power drill the size of Montana, and a doo-wop/Motown chorus and you’ve got an evening of potentially pure if slightly scary fun. After all, it’s only a fantasy … right?

Based on a low-budget 1960 movie by the schlockmeister Roger Corman, the musical enters into extremes of evil and transforms them into absurdly comic entertainment: Audrey II, the quickly growing and bloodthirsty exotic plant, is scheming to conquer the world, and it looks like she might accomplish it. So, people are mysteriously disappearing? But, true love appears to be a-borning, and that little plant is so darned cute!

Unlike Godot, which slowly spools out its undercurrent of the tragic, Little Shop revels in it, putting its horrifying elements front and center and then playing around with them as if they were the stuff of a Halloween-party prank.

The play takes place in a run-down flower shop on Skid Row (who buys flowers on Skid Row?) run by the snippity Mr. Mushkin (Michael Rouches), assisted by the sweet but somewhat dim Audrey (Abbe Drake) and the nebbish Seymour (Ryan Edinger), who has a secret crush on Audrey and an unfortunately too-green thumb: It’s Seymour who encourages the nefarious Audrey II to grow and, what the heck, devour people for nourishment now and again. Orin (Rich Cohn-Lee), Audrey’s abusive biker-dentist boyfriend, raises the stakes of venality, and the backup trio of Lydia Fleming, Jalena Scott, and Tanya Bihari act as an updated and considerably more hip Greek chorus, commenting musically on the action.

Thursday evening’s audience at Triangle appeared to be having a very good time, laughing loudly and frequently and applauding enthusiastically. I enjoyed the show, too, although with a couple of drawbacks. Recorded orchestral music played while the actors were singing, and the amplification was sometimes muddy, even slopping over dialogue. And I’d like to have seen a more sharply focused group performance: Little Shop calls for a fragile balance between realism and a sharp, almost cartoonish exaggeration. Drake, as Audrey, and Cohn-Lee, as Orin, came the closest to hitting that stride.

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Ah, but perfection isn’t everything, is it? The play’s the thing, and the play’s pleasures ring through — as does that slightly unsettling undercurrent of the tragic driving the comic.

Of all the seven deadly sins, the one that Little Shop most drills down on is greed — greed for love, greed for blood and flesh, greed for fame and money, greed for unchecked power. Sometimes it’s not so much the obviously evil that undoes everything: It’s the supposedly good people who give in to their basest instincts, persuade themselves that they’re doing the right thing, and unleash the hounds of hell. As that sage swampland opossum Pogo liked to put it, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Cuttings from that cute little plant, anyone?

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“Little Shop of Horrors” continues through Dec. 21 at Triangle Productions!, in The Sanctuary at Sandy Plaza, 1785 N.E. Sandy Blvd., Portland. Ticket and schedule information here.