We put our house — well, one floor of it — on the Fort Greene House tour this year to show off some of the progress we’ve slowly been making remodeling the old brownstone, room by room. It’s a great excuse to do some spring cleaning and buy some new geegaws that we otherwise might not have. (After all, we’ve been talking about replacing the lighting fixture over the front door for almost nine years. Now we finally did it.) It’s also a great excuse to get out of the house, unless your idea of a good time is talking to strangers about marble countertops.

Fortunately, it was beautiful afternoon — the wisteria was in full bloom, the birds were on the wing — so I went into a darkened theater to see a new production of Beckett’s Endgame at BAM, conveniently located a few blocks from our house. John Turturro plays the part of Hamm, the old man in the wheelchair who is cared for by his servant and surrogate son, Clov (Max Casella). Hamm’s father figure, Nagg (Alvin Epstein) — whom he addresses as “progenitor” and “fornicator” at various times — and mother manque, Nell (Elaine Stritch) live near at hand, in separate garbage cans. (Was this the inspiration for Oscar the Grouch?)

I probably read Endgame the first time in high school, and have seen several productions of it since then. It’s one of those plays that makes more sense, and gets funnier, as I get older — which could be said of Beckett in general. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Nell says, “I’ll grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more.”

I also needed to get away from the presidential primaries for the day. Everyone I met as I rambled through other people’s homes on the house tour was an Obama supporter (they were responding to my button) which was no surprise: multiracial and regenerative, Fort Greene is Obama country. And they, like me, were experiencing some anxiety about the state of things. HIllary’s Terminator-like tenaciousness and the tightening poll-numbers in Indiana and North Carolina are not making us question our faith (read the cover story in this month’s Vanity Fair, about RFK’s presidential run if you want to be reminded of the power of hope) or doubt the inevitability of his candidacy. But even as he brushes the dirt off his shoulder we want to go on. We still find it funny but we don’t laugh anymore.

I saw a bit of Hillary in Hamm: his parents die, his surrogate son abandons him (or tries to, endlessly) and he yammers on, seemingly for his own amusement. “Me to play,” are his first words, like those of a child, and the desire to put everyone through their paces — promising sugar plums that no longer exist –keeps the absurd comedy in motion. “I’m warming up for my last soliloquy,” he tells Clov, in hopes of keeping the disillusioned servant in his thrall. But the manchild has packed his bags. “Me to play,” he repeats to himself and then, wearily: “Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.”

This is a play whose ends are in its beginnings, as the characters keep reminding us, and Clov’s first lines, spoken to the audience, are “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” I’d like to say it could end on Tuesday but some nightmares it seems you just can’t wake up from. “You’re on earth,” as Hamm likes to say, “there’s no cure for that.”