HARVEY
But the other actors in Steppenwolf’s revival of this 1944 comedy seem acutely aware of the rabbit’s presence, judging from the muted deference they bring to the production. Despite the presence of some of Chicago’s best character actors, Harvey plays like a star vehicle without a star, in which the supporting actors deliberately work below their form in order to spotlight the unseen fellow playing the title role.
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The problem, of course, is that the play is not a star vehicle for a rabbit. The hero of Harvey, who’s present and visible throughout the play, is Elwood Dowd, a sweet-natured, perpetually inebriated bachelor whose mother’s death has left him both wealthy and alone. Into the void in Elwood’s life has walked Harvey, a pooka–a supernatural Celtic creature that takes peculiar animal forms, in this case that of a humanoid rabbit. Harvey, visible only to Elwood, is dismissed as a delusion by Elwood’s social-climbing sister Veta and her incipient old maid of a daughter, Myrtle Mae. Increasingly embarrassed and enraged at Elwood’s seemingly nutty behavior, the two women plan to have him committed to the local booby hatch, then to sell his rambling old house in order to finance Myrtle Mae’s desperate hunt for a husband. But the plan backfires, and Veta, not Elwood, is deemed in need of psychiatric incarceration. As humorist James Thurber–whose whimsical spirit of misanthropy permeates this play–warned in his Fables for Our Time, don’t count your boobies before they’re hatched.
