NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Sometimes, when all lighter diversions have failed, what a person who’s been in confinement needs is a wallow in the pitch-black mud. You know, the kind of indulgent plunge into art that salts all the chafed places in your psyche, encourages you to imagine the worst and — ideally — releases you into the light with a sense of catharsis from having confronted your nightmares.

During the past several months, I’ve gratefully consumed my share of comforting escapist fare — moldy murder mysteries, Barbara Pym’s wise novels of resignation, the hilarious royal soap opera “The Windsors” on Netflix. But there have also been times, when my mood has turned ashen, that I’ve counterintuitively searched my bookcases for my favorite plays about life as a claustrophobic room from which there is no escape.

The drama is singularly well suited to depicting the nightmare of endless entrapment. It is a form usually written, after all, to take place within a confined space, hemming in the players who strut and fret upon the stage.

On my last trip to London before the pandemic lockdown, I saw a production at the Old Vic theater that I have revisited in my mind many times since. It was Richard Jones’ revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” starring Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cumming. At the time, I was struck by the play’s relevant depiction of a withered world in which, as one character says, “there is no more nature.”

But what really seems pertinent now — and had me consulting the script recently — is Beckett’s presentation of an end-of-days existence in an airless crypt of a home, occupied by a splenetic man eternally confined to an armchair, his stiff-jointed and resentful attendant, and his ancient parents, who reside in separate dustbins. It is a place where time feels endless — something to kill, waste, mark and drown in — and what day or hour it may be is never entirely certain.

“Endgame” is a deeply, achingly funny play. I started to say, “for a cosmic tragedy.” But it’s because it’s a cosmic tragedy that it’s so funny. Rereading it the other day, I laughed boisterously and felt much relieved. So it tops my list of plays of eternal confinement that provide perverse satisfaction when you’re in the right mood. Here is a glancing list of some others.

“No Exit”
Original French title: “Huis Clos,” meaning closed doors. How could I not include philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s vicious little four-character one-acter? Its premise, after all, is that eternity (for the damned, at least) is a locked, inescapable room inhabited by the people you least want to be with. “No Exit” isn’t great theater. Existential meaning trumps credible in-the-moment existence here. But it’s a fierce, fast Munch-like scream of a read. (There’s also a wild BBC version of it from the early 1960s, starring a matinee-idol-handsome Harold Pinter, which you can screen on YouTube.) And you’ll certainly have no doubt agreeing by the time you reach its most quoted line of dialogue, near the end: “Hell is other people.”

“Buried Child”
For grown children quarantining with the folks. Technically, Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama from 1978 doesn’t qualify as a no-exit play. Its characters are free to enter and leave the rotting farmhouse in which it is set. Yet few works are better at evoking the sense of the magnetic, enclosing pull of family, when a young man returns to the house where he grew up and, after imagining himself metamorphosing into his ancestors, decides to stay there forever. (See also: Pinter’s “The Homecoming,” available for viewing in a memorable 1973 screen version with Ian Holm and Vivien Merchant; and Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog,” in which two brothers work outside the home but share a bleak combative eternity in their small apartment.)

“The Dance of Death”
This one’s for spouses who feel the need to vent volcanically after months of cheek-by-jowl connubial togetherness. August Strindberg’s ever-shocking 1900 drama shows a husband and wife celebrating their 25th anniversary on an isolated island military outpost with bitter games of recrimination that might just turn fatal. The great paradigm for later portraits of marriage as a blood sport, including Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“The Dumb Waiter”
Many works by Pinter — the master artist of power games in close quarters — might be included here, such as his little-known but deliciously malevolent radio drama “A Slight Ache.” But I’m going with this prickly 1960 evergreen in which two hired assassins wait for orders to kill in a clammy basement room. Also, doesn’t the title kind of suggest the way you see yourself right now?

“After the Blast”
Zoe Kazan’s spooky futurist drama imagines a tomorrow of endless confinement. The world has been rendered so toxic by its human inhabitants that everyone is forced to live in a sealed underground. Reality as we once knew it — which includes flavorful food and visiting the seashore — can be experienced only virtually, via an implanted chip. The idea of that microdevice really disturbed me when I saw this play several years ago at Lincoln Center Theater. Now I’m wondering how to get my hands on one.

“Happy Days”
Back to Beckett for the ultimate rendering of life as a confining trap from which no one escapes. This is the one in which an extremely chatty woman named Winnie is buried in an ever-rising mound of sand. And yet as she monologues blithely on — and on and on — with her chipper banalities, she emerges as a rather heroic figure, making the best of a bad lot, which happens to be everyone’s lot. I always leave “Happy Days” feeling oddly cheered.

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