Steppenwolf delivers Beckett in his essence in 'Endgame'

"Endgame" is a chess term for, well, the end of the game, when most of the pieces are off the board, leaving a sparse landscape of black and white and requiring tactics that are at once elementary and complex.

"Me to play," says William Petersen in his first line as Hamm, the blind, crippled, domineering centerpiece of Samuel Beckett's "Endgame," in a stunning, Spartan new production at Steppenwolf Theatre.

Hamm is at odds with his father and mother and most of all with Clov, his hobbled servant who may or may not be a more intimate relation. These are the only four characters in this bare-boned play. Yet the person playwright Beckett seems to be playing against is primarily himself. "Endgame" is a distillation of the existential themes that had obsessed him previously in his fiction and in "Waiting for Godot," his acknowledged masterpiece.

"Endgame" is a later, even more mature masterpiece, displaying his craft in its essence, with artifice stripped away amid an apocalyptic landscape and with no wasted words or characters. (Think of the relation of "The Road" to "Blood Meridian" in Cormac McCarthy's career, or that of "The Old Man and the Sea" to "The Sun Also Rises" in Hemingway's.) Petersen and his fellow cast mates, reliable Steppenwolf troupers all, share that attitude with not a wasted gesture, and the same goes for director Frank Galati's overall production.

All serve familiar Beckett themes: an absent if not malevolent God, an obsession with mortality and the body's decay, an antagonistic sense of nature (both human and otherwise).

"Nature has forgotten us," Hamm says.

"There is no nature anymore," replies Clov, played by Ian Barford with a shambling sense of grudging forbearance toward his master.

Francis Guinan, outfitted in a wig better befitting Mad Madam Mim, pops up quite literally out of an ash bin as the aptly named Nagg to deliver his lines with his usual impeccable comic timing. There is comedy in this stark play, and the production and the players find it, with Steppenwolf Artistic Director Martha Lavey uttering perhaps the keynote as Nell when she says, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that."

Yet it's Petersen - not hamming it up in what could easily become an overheated actor's exercise, but simply serving Beckett's text - who holds center stage with a subtle array of smirks and sneers as Hamm, a most unreliable narrator trying to make sense of what both he and Nell label "this farce, day after day." Lines echo and are repeated in this compressed, depressed, almost welcomely brief 75-minute play, and the production emphasizes that.

This "Endgame" takes place before a weathered, monolithic gray backdrop, where the actors' words sometimes literally ring hollow and the lids of the two ash bins - containing and confining dear old Nagg and Nell - give a very satisfactory clang when they slam shut. (Andre Pluess' sound design might be the most expressive single element of the production.)

"Let it end with a bang of darkness," Hamm declares, but "Endgame" concludes not like the finale of "The Sopranos," but on a note of resignation and comic endurance. For all its postwar existential angst, it continues to resonate today, especially in the hands of a company like Steppenwolf, with actors who refuse to sully the prevailing mood by taking so much as a well-deserved bow.