From the moment you walk into the theater, you can sense it’s going to be something quite different.

On the stark stage, a pasty figure is frozen in midgate. (Is that a mannequin?) He’s seems to be heading toward a human-shaped lump covered with a white tablecloth. (Is that a person in a chair?)

The still scene feels pregnant, as if something has just happened or is about to. And like the rest of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” which premiered in 1957, time seems to both stop and drone on and on and on.

And that’s all before the lights have even gone down.

The Star Bar Players’ production runs through March 27 at Cottonwood Center for the Arts.

The figures do come to life – if you want to call it that – and the Beckett’s Rubik’s Cube of a play grinds into motion. It’s not an easy 90 minutes, but director Dylan Mosley’s production is riveting: beautiful and grotesque, poignant and maddening, puzzling, darkly funny and ultimately, strangely satisfying.

An Irish poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and director, Beckett was fascinated by contradictions, as well as impotence born out of failure and loss. And there’s plenty of both in the bleak, basement world of Hamm (Bob Morsch), who is blind and cannot walk, and his servant Clov (Jude Bishop), who cannot sit, and Hamm’s mother Nell (Sallie Walker) and father Nagg (Steve Wallace), who both cannot walk and live in trash cans.

In this gray nothing, everyone is gone. Everything is dead.

Even the ocean has relocated. “Outside of here is death,” Hamm says repeatedly.

Hamm yearns for an ending to it all and Clov wants to leave, effectively letting Hamm and his parents die, but neither can be so decisive. Even the cadence of Beckett’s exquisitely telegraphic dialogue captures the tug of war.

<p”You don’t love me,” Hamm says to Clov.

“No.”

“You loved me once.”

“Once.”

Not surprisingly, Beckett’s work demands a masterful director and actors able to balance the comic with the tragic, to inject humanity even as they negate it with obtuse nonsense. And Star Bar’s last attempt, a largely success production of “Waiting for Godot” in 2010, proves they have the sand to take it on. In fact, director Mosley’s cast delivers a flawless rendering of this tough material.

As the chair-bound centerpiece to “Endgame,” Morsch’s Hamm is hardly static, throwing his arms wide for emphasis, ordering Clov about and working his wing chair like a pommel horse. The choice of his “Gone with the Wind”-perfect accent is seductive, belying his capability for brutality. You can’t like Morsch’s Hamm, but somehow you can’t hate him either.

As Hamm’s foil, Bishop does a lot with very little. His Clov is reactive, a stop-motion robot limping from one task to the next, one order to another.

Bishop cloaks Clov beautifully in pale impassivity, allowing his growing agitation to sneak out in an intentionally dropped telescope, an aggressively loud alarm clock and Clov’s glee at finally denying Hamm a request. Like Hamm, Clov is more than one thing: a victim, yes, but one capable of his own heartlessness.

As Hamm’s father and mother, Wallace and Walker were terrific, creating surprisingly poignant and ugly portrayals, even as they paddle through conversation that makes as much a sense as alphabet soup. Kudos.

High marks also go to Jenifer Andrew’s costumes, A. Clements Mosley’s makeup, Ben Sloan’s lighting design and Morsch’s sound design, which all effectively underscore the sad landscape of “Endgame.”

The Star Bar Player’s production of Samuel Beckett’s”Endgame” runs through March 27 at Cottonwood Center for the Arts.

Tracy Mobley-Matinez Saturday December 13, 2014. Photo by Jeff Kearney

Jeff Keaerney

The Star Bar Player’s production of Samuel Beckett’s”Endgame” runs through March 27 at Cottonwood Center for the Arts.