Admit it: Who among us has not tried to alleviate boredom at some point by making funny voices or noises? When humming or whistling just won’t do the job, when the laundry room or the long car ride or wherever requires a little extra company, sometimes only a little foolery will do, self-consciousness be damned.

Now swap that extra-long spin cycle for eternity in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Those voices would get awfully animated, no?

In Andrei Belgrader’s respectable if occasionally overripe production of “Endgame,” the blighted and unmistakably Beckettian deathscape on display offers little promise of new companionship for Hamm (John Turturro), a despot in decline. “Infinite emptiness will be all around you,” he moans, “all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it.” And so he does his best to test that theory by blustering, soliloquizing, demanding, and whimpering his way through nearly every one of the play’s interactions, many of them passionate debates with himself.

As in the game of chess, which supplies Samuel Beckett’s 1957 tragicomedy with its title, the king’s power is disproportionate to his mobility. His helpmate, Clov (Max Casella), gets around with a hitching, pigeon-toed gait, and his parents, Nagg and Nell (the noted Beckett veteran Alvin Epstein and the noted Beckett nonveteran Elaine Stritch), reside in his-and-hers trash cans, but Hamm can neither see nor walk. He can talk, though. Boy, can he talk. And this production hits the occasional snag when Mr. Turturro takes it upon himself to live up to Hamm’s name, stuffing his monologues with an often unnecessary blizzard of tempos, pitches, and volumes.

Mr. Belgrader has directed several Beckett plays, and one typically does not stay in the Beckett estate’s good graces by taking liberties. So, unlike Deborah Warner’s fussy (and very funny) “Happy Days,” which also came to BAM’s Harvey Theater earlier this season, his “Endgame” plays by the rules from beginning to end. Or at least from beginning to five seconds before the end: A beautifully understated lighting trick at the finale hammers home the ceaseless nature of Hamm and Clov’s cacophanous byplay while staying true to Beckett’s requested “brief tableau.”

Similarly, all four performers find their own nooks and crannies within Beckett’s proscribed text, even given the occasional feeling of capriciousness surrounding Mr. Turturro’s eruptions. Acting honors, unsurprisingly, go to Mr. Epstein, who played Clov in the American premiere in 1958 and whose Nagg is a study in decrepitude. His entire face labors with the effort of remembering an old joke or a cherished memory, and his fingers skitter restlessly around the rim of his trash can like insects surprised by a sudden light. (And aren’t bugs supposedly the only things that will survive the apocalypse?) Pathetically gumming a biscuit, tossing exasperated and rather sad looks at his grandiose son, Mr. Epstein is the picture of tragedy. Which makes him, this being Beckett, incredibly amusing to watch.

After all, to quote his wife, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.” As Nell, Ms. Stritch somewhat miraculously holds her own alongside Mr. Epstein. American theater’s reigning icon of steely glamour appears with a grubby lace cap covering her coiffed silver hair and a trash can obscuring those legendary legs, a disparity that Ms. Stritch acknowledges with a momentary I-can-scarcely-believe-it-myself look. She then turns her very first line — “What is it, my pet? … Time for love?” — into a deadpan bit of drollery that any number of her past gimlet-eyed collaborators, from Noël Coward to Stephen Sondheim, would be delighted to claim as their own.

The role of Clov can easily fade into the background, particularly when contending with a Hamm of this magnitude, but Mr. Casella puts his own forceful stamp on the role, blending a touching physical vulnerability with impressive physical exactitude. Only Clov is still able to peer through two gray windows to the outside world, which he unforgettably describes as “corpsed.” Neither he nor anybody else is sure what happened or what is still to come. All they know is that they’re not exactly looking forward to it, whatever it is:

HAMM: Have you not had enough?

CLOV: Yes! … Of what?

Finally, Hamm is left to contemplate the idea of a life spent with himself and only himself. He sees through his own logorrhea, recognizing it as the actions of “the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark.” For once, Mr. Turturro is silent.

Until May 18 (651 Fulton St., between Ashland and Rockwell places, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).