Harvey’s enduring fun

TOVA G. KORNFELD

Metro Theatre ends its season with the screwball comedy Harvey, written by Mary Chase and immortalized in the iconic 1950 film starring James Stewart as the eccentric, affable Elwood P. Dowd.

Elwood, a middle-aged bachelor, lives with his widowed sister, Veta Louise Simmons, and her daughter, Myrtle Mae, somewhere in Colorado. His best friend, Harvey, is a six-foot, three-and-one-half-inch white-rabbit pooka, invisible to everyone but Elwood. A pooka is a Celtic folklore character that can appear in any number of animal forms, has magical powers and can be mischievous. (Puck, in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is thought to be a pooka.) Harvey can stop clocks, making time stand still, and he can cause objects to disappear and reappear at will.

For his part, Elwood is without guile and sees only the good in people. “I always have a wonderful time, wherever I am, whoever I am with,” he says. Elwood has one vice, alcohol, and he spends a great deal of time escorting Harvey to bars around town and introducing him to the patrons. Most of the townsfolk tolerate Elwood’s curious behavior but his family feels that he needs treatment in a psychiatric institution.

Harvey ran on Broadway for 1,775 performances from 1944-1949 and won Chase a Pulitzer Prize for drama. The movie version garnered an Academy Award best actor nomination for Stewart and an Oscar for Josephine Hull as best supporting actress for her portrayal of Veta. The success of the story has been attributed to its escapist theme and a morality that appealed to audiences recovering from the horrors of the Second World War. Harvey’s enduring impact on American pop culture continues, with references in such movies as Field of Dreams and A Beautiful Mind.

On the Metro Theatre stage, the curtain rises on the library of a 1940s upper-middle-class American home where aspiring socialite Veta is hosting a ladies tea. The decorum of the event is shattered when Elwood appears and introduces Harvey to the “ladies that lunch,” all of whom quickly find excuses to leave. Veta is mortified and decides then and there that her brother must be institutionalized to save her sanity and preserve her daughter’s chances to find a suitable husband. So, off she goes with Elwood in tow to Chumley’s Rest sanitarium, run by psychiatrist Dr. William Chumley. Unfortunately for her, during the admission process, while describing the pooka – who she nervously confides she has seen on occasion – she is mistakenly committed in place of her brother. As the hospital staff realizes the error and tries to sort out the mess, the audience is taken on a zany ride. Finally, Elwood returns to the sanitarium for the ultimate cure – an injection of Serum 977, to shock him back to reality and erase Harvey from his mind forever.

Trent Glukler plays Elwood with a charm reminiscent of Stewart’s disarming screen presence. One gets the sense that Harvey is there next to him. Susan Cox, although somewhat melodramatic at first, eventually gets it right as the high-strung, neurotic Veta. One of her best lines to Myrtle Mae is so indicative of the time: “Don’t be didactic, it is unbecoming in young women, and men don’t like it.” Community member Lawrence Green as Dr. Chumley puts a nice spin on his character, who also begins to “see” Harvey, while Josh Zumstien is strong as his young protégé, Dr. Sanderson. Metta Rose, as the nurse with a crush on the young doctor, and Kate Kysow, as Myrtle Mae, play the other main female roles. Kevin Sloan, while small in stature, is big in his portrayal of the family friend, Judge Gaffney, and two supporting male characters carry a lot of punch: Jason Hunt, in the physical role of the male orderly, and community member David Blue as the cabbie who delivers the turning-point speech, telling Veta that, of the people he has driven to and from the sanitarium, it’s the people on their way there that are happy, wanting to smell the flowers and see the sunset, but it’s the people on their way home that “became perfectly normal human beings, and you know what stinkers those people are.” Diana Sandberg, Iris Gittens and Niamh Tennyson round out the cast with the latter two doing double duty as stage managers. Under the watchful eye of director Cristi Lowis, the show comes together nicely.

As usual, the Metro set is stylish, with one side as the elegant Simmons/Dowd residence and the other set up as the sanitarium reception room. I would be remiss in not mentioning the most famous prop in the story, the portrait of Harvey and Elwood that Elwood hangs over the mantelpiece in Act II that causes a commotion. The costumes are 1940s chic, hats and gloves for the ladies and overcoats and fedoras for the gentlemen. Of course, Harvey’s fedora has two holes in the crown for his ears.

The show runs until July 16. Call 604-266-7191 or visit metrotheatre.org.

Tova G. Kornfeld is a local writer and lawyer.

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