Why, in your contribution to The Flea’s omnibus show The Great Recession, did you have to combine a man wearing mime makeup with audience interaction? Both of those things have the same effect on me as oxygen masks falling out of the ceiling on an airplane.

That mime (or was he a clown?) is awfully talky for his makeup, anyway. As portrayed by Nick Maccarone, the Host always seems dangerously close to grabbing you by the back of your head and slamming your face into the floor.Think Jack Nicholson’s The Joker, presiding over a 12-minute contest to see if anyone in the audience will prevent the unemployed and broke Lucy (Sarah Ellen Stephens) from doing something monstrous for $25,000. Of course she will, and of course there’s an actor tucked in with the audience, but what’s really surprising is that Rapp or anyone else thinks that we’d be surprised at what desperate people are willing to do for money.

Which is the problem with most of the plays in The Great Recession. The best (Itamar Moses’ “Fucked” and “New York Living,” by Thomas Bradshaw) steer clear of commenting directly on the current state of the economy, instead telling stories about twenty-somethings struggling to stay afloat and still get laid. “Fucked” finds Cindy (Jessica Pohly) and Reed (Dorein Makhloghi) breaking up just before they go on a trip paid for by Reed’s wheeling and dealing father—and Reed owns the apartment they share.

Bradshaw is equally obsessed with real estate, as his quartet of characters scramble from one partner to another based on financial necessity. Both plays, though, could benefit from more uniformly excellent casts; Pohly’s performance is so unlikable there’s little drama to the breakup, and an over-thetop, campy Morgan Reis isn’t even in the same book, let alone on the same page, as the others in “New York Living.”

Only two plays remain after intermission: Sheila Callaghan’s “Recess” and Will Eno’s thoughtful but not entirely successful “Unum,” which follows a dollar bill through its torturous route while simultaneously illuminating both the cause and effect of the recession. But Eno’s effects are too obvious to be good theater and the cast, like most of the performers involved in The Great Recession, are entirely capable but unmemorable.

Except, that is, for the men and women involved in Callaghan’s grating “Recess.” Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Callaghan continues her trend of not writing actual characters as much as conceits. An anorexic obsessively exercises; a woman lies on a bed and begs for sex; a man obsessively makes lists; a twitching woman sounds as if she’s vomiting out her half of the conversation. There are no explanations of how they’ve all sunk so low, no reasons given for the state of the world that has left them so hardened that two dead bodies lie side-by-side on the floor, unmourned and unmoved. Callaghan (who wrote the excruciating That Pretty Pretty; Or, The Rape Play) continues in her quest to be the Emperor’s New Clothes of playwrights: She keeps claiming a point of view, but it remains invisible.

There is one particularly silvery lining to the evening—the performance of Amy Jackson in Erin Courtney’s “Severed.” As a hung-over, glorified babysitter at a children’s center, waiting to be interviewed on camera about the effects of the recession, Jackson is a kooky, prickly delight as she explains to the well-dressed man waiting with her that the myth of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar’s descent into the underworld has everything to do with the giant papier-mâché eunuch’s head sitting on the chair between them.

Jackson’s Edie Sedgwick-hair and looseygoosey laugh mark her as the kind of person who will always thrive, no matter the economic climate.What a relief to watch her blithely don that eunuch’s head for her oncamera interview, a refreshing change from the scrambling and desperation that mark everyone else’s contributions to the evening.

Right now, seeing someone living on the fringe pointedly refuse to allow the state of the country to interfere with her life is more radical than watching someone willing to kill for $25,000.

> The Great Recession

Through Dec. 30, The Flea Theater, 41 White St. (betw. Broadway & Church St.), 212-352- 3101; $25.