Rick Borutta

The writer Samuel Beckett enters psychoanalysis with Wilfred Bion in 1934 to get relief from psychological and psychosomatic ailments. He relives moments with his cold mother, May, his mentor James Joyce, and others, revealing a problem he isn't ready to solve. When he learns from Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung about a young girl who dreamt her own impending death from scarlet fever, the young Beckett begins to hallucinate Jung and the girl as parts of his inner self trying to help him. However, he resists and in so doing gets stabbed near to death just before the occupation of Paris, France during WWII. Inspired by Dante’s La Divina Comedia, ancient philosophy and films from the silent era, Beckett assembles the fantasies he needs to surrender his ego and arrive at the place in his psyche that he had been resisting during the first part of his life. Once he has his epiphany, he is able to utilize the girl as his psychopomp from the underworld to create Waiting for Godot.

An autobiographical memoir, of a personal assistant and his very eccentric, narcissistic, celebrity doing a one-woman show who happens to be Elaine Stritch. Borutta retells the story of his time, and what he has learned about himself since then.