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Like all of Samuel Beckett's plays, Endgame, now being produced by the Ten Thousand Things company, is an odd piece. The author tended to write claustrophobic plays in which a few people bother each other over and over again; the most famous of these is, of course, Waiting for Godot, in which two bored men spend the entire play waiting for the titular character, who (spoiler alert!) never arrives. He is also the author of Happy Days, which features a woman who is, inexplicably, buried up to her bosoms in sand, who has an exacting daily routine that she obsessively repeats, and who talks compulsively. One of his last pieces was Breathe, which was just a scene, really, in the notorious 1969 pay Oh! Calcutta! It lasts for 25 seconds and consists of a cry, some breathing, and then another cry. And that's it.

It's safe to say Beckett was something of a weirdo, but he was a weirdo whose writing inspired a lot of attention throughout the 20th century. It was, after all, a century in which all of humanity seemed determined to repeat the same hideous mistakes over and over again until they destroyed themselves. It was a century that seemed abandoned by God, or, at least, was overseen by a God who didn't care. Beckett is often associated with two of the more pessimistic movements of the century, the Theater of the Absurd and the Existentialist movements, which both tried to grapple with man's meaning in an uncaring and often ridiculous and grotesque world -- although neither of these were movements so much as they were disparate and often contradictory creations that were lumped together by critics and academics who felt a need to group them together under one clearinghouse phrase. And, come to think of, in a century that produced two World Wars, the Holocaust, the mass deaths in Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot, among an endless and exhausting list of Terrible things people do to each other, "pessimistic" might not be the right word for these philosophers and dramatists. A better word might be "honest."

And so, among all these authors of misery and weirdness, we have Beckett, one of the most miserable and weirdest of all, and, in 1957, he wrote Engame, one of his most miserable and weirdest works. The story, if I can summarize it briefly, is that of the blind and crippled Hamm and his somewhat less crippled manservant Clov, and their story, as the title suggests, takes place at the end of time. Some unnamed tragedy happened in the not-too-distant past, and Hamm and Clov managed to surive it, albeit just barely. Now they torment each other and busy themselves with little rituals, as characters do in Beckett plays, and wait for something to happen, which is also what Beckett characters do. In this case, they are waiting to die. There are two other characters, Hamm's parents, who live, if you can call it that, in dustbins, emerge very briefly to tell jokes and reminisce, and then (spoiler alert!) expire.

It sounds depressing. All of Beckett's plays sound depressing, and none of them are, not really. They're sometimes described as being blackly comic, but they aren't that either. Audience members sometimes laugh, in part because Beckett seems to have been inspired by European vaudeville, and so there is sometimes a baggy pants comic quality to his scripts. Bad directors will play this up -- one famous production of Godot featured Steve Martin and Robin Williams. But Beckett wasn't really a funny writer. When his characters engage in clowning, there's a sort of desperation to it that really isn't very amusing. The comic story that Hamm's father tells here, as an example, has the quality of a tale that has been told so often it has lost its meaning, told by a man who no longer remembers why you tell jokes.

So if Beckett's plays don't have the happy face of comedy or the frowny face of tragedy, what do they have? Well, that's the question, and it's a hard one to answer. His plays are pretty fascinating to watch, if you don't mind their general plotlessness and tendency to engage in obsessive repetition. As much as Beckett is associated with the Absurdists, he sometimes feels more like a kinsman to the Dadaists, who were deliberately anti-art, and fairly meticulous in creating work that defied our presumptions about what art is. Beckett eschews plot, he eschews action, and he generally eschews climax. He plays exist in a sort of endless present, long after anything has happened and with nothing seeming likely to happen any time soon. But his plays, and Endgame in particular, weren't just exercises in form -- his characters seem very human, albeit pretty unlikable. This is not to say you wind up disliking the characters you see in Beckett's plays -- no, they just aren't very sympathetic, and know it, and don't care.

So Ten Thousand Things has mounted Endgame, and they are a good company to do it, because they take their plays to prisons and retirement homes and homeless shelters, where the audiences may share some of the experience of living a plotless life of waiting for something to happen, and either not having it happen or having it be terrible. This production was directed by Marion McClinton, and she gets the tone of Beckett right -- it's morose and unfunny, but never drags or feels freighted with significance, which is a risk with Beckett. It helps that she has cast two actors in the lead roles who are enormously watchable: Terry Bellamy as Hamm and Christiana Clark as Clov. Bellamy plays the blind, wheelchair-bound Hamm with the hammy grandeur of an ancient thespian, but there isn't a trace of camp in his performance. Instead, he gives us a character who is used to giving orders and holding court, and still takes a theatrical pleasure from it. Clark's Clov, in the meanwhile, is frazzled and numb; she was a child when the end of the world began, and has never really known much of anything but waiting for it all to wind down. She comes when Bellamy calls, but has none of the obsequiousness of a servant, but instead the exhausted sense of duty of a child tended to their dying grandparent.

Ten Thousand Things has always had its pick of great local actors, as demonstrated by the fact that this production features Steve Hendrickson, who is one of the Cities' workingest and highest-regarded stage actors, and Barbra Berlovitz, who cofounded the Theatre de la Jeune Lune. They play Hamm's parents. The roles are very small, particularly for Berlovitz, and involve hanging around in a rubbish bin for the entire play, which is not the sort of thing performers of the stature of Hendrickson or Berlovitz do unless they really want to. The roles are pretty juicy, though, and both actors take advantage of this, Berlovitz bringing to her role a spacey sweetness that suggests a woman whose mind is almost gone, while Hendrickson limns his character with a thick Irish brogue and a jokey bonhomie -- until, at least, he wants something, at which point he starts snapping and making demands like an impatient tyrant.

The play is staged simply, as Ten Thousand Thing productions must be, as there are limited stage properties or sets you can lug into a prison. Hamm sits in a jerry-rigged wheelchair, and there are two trashbins onstage, and that's about it. A woman named Heather Barringer sits behind Hamm, surrounded by an assortment of small acoustic musical instruments from around the world, mostly tuned rhythm instruments, but she doesn't so much provide musical accompaniment as occasional sound effects. Hamm will sometimes roll a few inches in his wheelchair, and Clark enters and leaves with several ladders, but that's about it for stage action, which is as it should be -- directors who try to impose to much stage action onto Beckett risk detracting from the essentially static quality of his plays, and, if you're afraid of long stretches in which not much happens, you shouldn't tackle Beckett.

But this may be a good time for a Beckett revival. After all, we're less than a decade into the 21st century, and humanity still seems determined to turn parts of the earth into a mass grave, and the rest of us watch from the sidelines, bewildered by the monstrous absurdity of it and waiting for something to change. Beckett could be speaking with the most pessimistic of contemporary voices -- or, at least the most honest.

Endgame plays through March 15. Call 612.203.9502 for tickets and showtimes.