There are giants striding the Charity Randall stage. Chief among them are Samuel Beckett and his bleak, jaunty "Endgame," an ironist's tragedy about the final days. As staged by Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre, it's absorbing intellectual vaudeville with comic surfaces and thrilling tragic depths.

Bob Donaldson, Post-Gazette Larry John Meyers Is Hamm in Samuel Beckett's "Endgame," part of Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theater's BeckettFest. Click photo for larger image. 'Endgame' Where: Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre at Charity Randall Theatre, Stephen Foster Memorial, Oakland. When: tonight at 8 (pre-show lecture at 7); Thur., Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m.; Aug. 30 and Sept. 1, 8 p.m.; Sept. 2 and 3, 2 p.m.; Sept. 6, 8 and 9, 8 p.m. Tickets: $26-$36 (students $15); 412-394-3353.

Rising to the occasion are PICT's guest director Tadeusz Bradecki and his designers, unwilling to be merely acolytes, but eager to wrestle with Beckett on equal terms. And Larry John Meyers and Simon Bradbury give what may be the performances of their lives as the theatrical tyrant, Hamm, and his subversive dependent, Clov.

When a great text meets worthy interpreters, there are two kinds of success. In one, interpreters and text merge into a miraculous incarnation of the author's will. The other is more tempestuous, a robust dialectic.

This "Endgame" is the latter. And Beckett's parable is so full of ideas and feelings, illuminated with such mordant wit, that the audience is challenged to rise to the occasion, too.

The old saw has it that life is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think. But in Beckett, thought tends toward tragedy while feeling provides comic illumination.

There's a suggestion of this duality in the expatriate Irishman's adoption of French, in which he wrote both "Waiting for Godot" and "Endgame," later turning them into English. He needed, it is said, the spareness and rigor of French to narrow his lushly verbal Irish heritage toward minimalist purity.

You can feel this struggle right there on stage, where a ritual and rhythm as old as humankind is never able to quell the earthy insights and hijinks embedded in a language which speaks both of the philosopher's closet and the pratfalls of burlesque.

That fruitful conflict within Beckett parallels that between Beckett and these PICT interpreters. Bradecki and designers Steffi Mayer-Staley (set) and Christopher Popowich (lights) have made boldly manifest the theatrical metaphor that Beckett weaves throughout the play, turning the spare, solitary room he specifies into a fascinating vista.

The audience sits on bleachers at the rear of the stage, looking past Hamm and Clov on the forestage toward the auditorium beyond. Snow drifts down; the distant seats are partly covered with drop cloths; there are theatrical (nautical?) debris of ropes and ladders; and on a tech table sits a small model of the Cathedral of Learning. Into this space Clov finally exits, as the doors to the outside open beyond him.

How does this fascinating, variously lit space comport with the barren land and ocean Clov says he sees? We lose the unseen wasteland of the text, which has been interpreted as the aftermath of disaster (nuclear, environmental) or just the void beyond every individual. We also lose the related suggestion that the claustrophobic room may be an individual skull.

And what of those rear doors? Is there really a further world out there? Doesn't this compromise Hamm's magnificent isolation?

Or does it simply add possibilities? Whichever, "Endgame" is 100 minutes brimming with comic/poignant enigma.

Nothing compromises the two lead performances. In keeping with the set, Meyers plays the quintessential theatrical ham, a showy, scene-stealing old trouper whose every grand gesture is undercut by existential doubt. By turns rumbling and querulous, sensitive and cruel, expansive and pinched, this Hamm is a bravura performance.

But it meets its match in Bradbury's Clov, a stuttering, plaintive, pugnacious wise fool to Hamm's cranky Lear. Hamm constantly speculates self-consciously, but Clov does it less, giving his occasional naive insights clarion clarity and barbed force. And Bradbury gets to use his eyes, which can crinkle with dark, angry mischief (think a mix of Puck and Caliban) or reveal deep pools of loneliness.

Their accents are strange. Bradbury's is generally Irish, honoring Beckett, though it slips into North Country English. Meyers' is American. Meanwhile, Kate Young's Nell flirts with Irish, but not Bruce Hill's Nagg. Probably this is to frustrate any sense of specific place, but it may just be that Bradecki's Polish ear wasn't tuned to this detail.

Nell and Nagg are Hamm's discarded parents, whom he keeps bottled up in two ashcans (shipped off to a minimum care facility, you could say). Bradecki allows them to play the humor of marginalization and senility, and they do, as they complain, reminisce and canoodle to entertaining effect.

"Me to play," says Hamm, a reference to chess but also theater. "Old endgame lost of old," he says -- from birth we know that death awaits. "Play and lose and have done with losing," he continues -- the game is worth the play, no matter the predestined end.