Part One
Simon Axler is a famed sexagenarian stage actor who suddenly and inexplicably loses his gift. His weak attempts at portraying Prospero and Macbeth on stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington lead to poor reviews, sending Axler into a profound depression and cause him to give up acting and contemplate suicide with a shotgun he keeps in his attic. His wife, Victoria, a former ballerina, is unable to deal with Axler's depression and moves to California, where their son lives. Axler checks himself into a psychiatric hospital on the advice of his physician and stays there for 26 days.
In the hospital, Axler meets another patient, Sybil Van Buren, who tells him about catching her second husband sexually abusing her young daughter. She expresses shame at not immediately reporting her husband or removing him from the home and admits to attempting suicide. Sybil asks Axler whether he would be willing to kill her husband and he tells her he fears he would "botch the job".
Months after his stint in the hospital, Axler's agent, Jerry Oppenheim, visits him at his upstate New York home to tell him about an offer to play James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night. Axler refuses, fearing another failure. In the fan mail Oppenheim brings, Axler finds a letter from Sybil, thanking him for listening to her problems in the hospital. She says she did not recognize him at the time but decided to write him after catching one of his old movies on TV.
Read more about this topic: The Humbling, Plot
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