THE QUEEREST SHOW on Broadway in the summer of 2012 didn’t feature drag queens, buff chorus boys, or lesbian love songs. Instead, audiences attuned to the codes of same-sex relationships may have been surprised to find the delightful zing of transgression in an old-fashioned chestnut about the love between an amiable alcoholic and a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit.
Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy Harvey was one of the biggest stage hits of the 1940s, and its popularity endures thanks to the much-beloved 1950 film version starring Jimmy Stewart as the main character, a lovable lush named Elwood P. Dowd whose best friend is an enormous rabbit named Harvey. While Harvey has always been a delightful ode to the virtues of nonconformity, audiences at the recent revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company might have experienced the play as the story a male couple who triumph over the family and society that disapprove of their relationship.
At the center of this queer tale was a winning performance by Jim Parsons, best known to television audiences as the brilliant and arrogant physicist Dr. Sheldon Cooper on the hit sit-com The Big Bang Theory.
Harvey takes place over the course of a single day, during which Veta Louise Simmons decides that she must have her brother Elwood committed to a mental institution. You see, Veta’s daughter Myrtle Mae is now of marriageable age and is trying to make an entrance into the respectable circles of Denver high society. But Uncle Elwood continually embarrasses the family by introducing people to his best friend, an unseen fairy spirit (also known as a pooka) who takes the form of a six-foot-tall rabbit. We learn that Elwood was a “mama’s boy” who never married, and now spends all of his time with Harvey: they travel together, go to the theater together, and have their portrait painted together. And they are almost always drinking together. Since Elwood’s “eccentricity” threatens Veta’s social standing and Myrtle’s marriage prospects, the only solution is to lock him away.
Those familiar with the history of homosexuality will recognize the similarities between Elwood’s plight and that of gays and lesbians in the 1940s and ’50s, when homosexuality was treated as both a crime and a mental illness. More than a few “peculiar uncles” were locked away in asylums to save the reputations of respectable families, and Chase’s play gives us a psychiatrist and a judge to represent the medical and legal forces that oppressed GLBT people. The push to keep the latter invisible was also supported by the entertainment industry, with the Wales Padlock Law on Broadway (enacted in 1927) and the Hays Production Code in Hollywood (1930) making sure that gay and lesbian characters were as invisible as, well, a pooka.
In our own era, audiences can see a wide variety of GLBT characters on stage and screen, and therefore they might be more attuned to the dynamics of same-sex relationships, even if the text does not mark such relationships as explicitly “gay.” Harvey encourages such a queer interpretation because it doesn’t follow the usual rules of comedy, which insist that lead characters be matched up in heterosexual marriage and that outsiders are reabsorbed into the community. According to genre conventions, Elwood should be cured of his alcoholism, say goodbye to the rabbit, and walk down the aisle with the lovely young nurse who helped to cure him. But that’s not the story that Mary Chase gives us.
In the final act, Veta, backed by a judge and a doctor, persuades Elwood to submit to an injection of “Shock Formula 977,” a sort of chemical lobotomy that will rid him of his fantastic illusions—effectively ending his relationship with Harvey. The unlikely deus ex machina who changes Veta’s mind is a cab driver who convinces her that a happy lunacy is always better than a miserable conformity. And this is where Harvey becomes surprisingly transgressive for a middlebrow comedy.
Veta decides that she cares more about her brother’s happiness than about the marriage prospects of her daughter. Brother and sister are reunited—along with the six-foot rabbit—all to live happily together, giving up their place in respectable society and choosing to live by their own standards. “It’s nothing to you,” Veta tells the judge and doctor. “You don’t even have to come around. It’s our business.” Rather than making Elwood conform to the conventions of society, the play valorizes this unusual relationship between man and pooka.
A comparison of Elwood P. Dowd and the actor playing him reveals the complexities of our particular cultural moment when it comes to queerness. Many critics have praised Jim Parsons’ recent coming out as the new model for GLBT celebrities: no sensational headlines, a matter-of-fact remark about a difference that makes no real difference. But the “normalization” of GLBT people and relationships in our culture is hardly complete, as we struggle with issues ranging from homeless youth rejected by their families to continuing discrimination in employment, the struggle for marriage equality, and so on. And many activists argue that we should celebrate difference and diversity rather than push for a kind of assimilation that will make us blend in. So while American culture can now accept an openly gay television star, the play Harvey shows us a world in which a “deviant” relationship is a problem to be corrected or destroyed. Both perspectives continue to exist at the present time.
This tension makes Harvey an intriguing and paradoxical play for the contemporary audience. Mary Chase’s comedy is now a period piece, and director Scott Ellis’ staging of the play was resolutely old-fashioned, maintaining the tone of whimsy that pleased audiences decades ago. But even if Harvey hasn’t changed much, the audience for Harvey has, and we’re bound to find new and different meanings in that mysterious rabbit. In 1944, many critics viewed Harvey as a celebration of dipsomania and the pleasures of avoiding reality through alcoholism. The play’s less literal critics saw the triumph of imagination and fantasy over dull convention and practicality. Today, we might also recognize how a “not quite normal” relationship, say, between a man and a fairy, can turn one into an outsider, rejected or rendered invisible by family and community. Over the course of the play, Veta changes from a woman intent on destroying Harvey into someone who defends and protects the special love between her brother and his unusual friend. The subversive triumph of the play is that it encourages the audience to make that transformation, too.
Jordan Schildcrout, an assistant professor of theater at Purchase College, SUNY, has contributed to Theatre Journal, The Journal of American Culture, and the Journal of Popular Culture.
