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.
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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.
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Further negative notices came from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, which criticized the novel as "an overstuffed short story... a slight, disposable work".