Valley Playhouse is proud to present the Pulitzer-prize winning comedy

Harvey

by Mary Chase

 

Thursdays – Saturdays, June 7 – 9 and June 14 – 16 at 8 pm

Sundays June 10 and 17 at 3 pm

*Thursday, June 14 is “Pay What You Will” night

**Sunday, June 17 “Bring your father for free” matinee

at Court Square Theater, 61 Graham Street

                                                         Tickets $12/ $10 for seniors and groups of 10 or more. To order tickets: click here.

Harvey was originally produced in 1944 at the 48th Street Theater and was directed by famed actress-turned-directory Antoinette Perry, for whom the Broadway Tony Awards are named. The original production ran 4 years. Actor James Stewart replace Frank Fay as Elwood during the original run. It won the Pulitzer prize for drama in 1945.

THE STORY: When Elwood P. Dowd starts to introduce his imaginary friend, Harvey, a six-and-a-half-foot rabbit, to guests at a society party, his sister, Veta, has seen as much of his eccentric behavior as she can tolerate. She decides to have him committed to a sanitarium to spare her daughter, Myrtle Mae, and their family from future embarrassment. Problems arise, however, when Veta herself is mistakenly assumed to be on the verge of lunacy when she explains to doctors that years of living with Elwood’s hallucination have caused her to see Harvey also! The doctors commit Veta instead of Elwood, but when the truth comes out, the search is on for Elwood and his invisible companion. When he shows up at the sanitarium looking for his lost friend Harvey, it seems that the mild-mannered Elwood’s delusion has had a strange influence on more than one of the doctors. Only at the end does Veta realize that maybe Harvey isn’t so bad after all.