Harvey is a classic Broadway play first presented in 1944. It was written by Mary Chase, and it was recently presented at the Case Theatre in Jacksonville, Florida as part of the season for a community theater group. The appeal of the play was evident even as some of the acting and direction were weak, an the minimal settings and stage decor was not used well enough to overcome the clear fact that the play was originally written in a time when a proscenium stage and a fully-dressed set were the norm and that this play was written in that tradition. The production was, however, an interesting try and probably did as well as it could given the limitations under which the play was performed.
Mary Chase was born in 1907 in Denver, Colorado--she married Robert Lamont Chase, a newspaper reporter, and herself worked as a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News. She also worked as a publicity director, playwright, and the author of books for children. Her first play was "Me Third," produced in 1936 in Denver. It was later produced in New York in 1937 under the title "Now You've Done It." Sorority House was her first three-act play and was produced in Denver in 1939. It was filmed in 1939, and she adapted her play for the screen. Harvey opened on broadway November 1, 1944 and ran for four and on-half years. The financial success of this play helped Chase and her family, but the notoriety the play brought her was harder to handle:
Any precipitous change is a terrible shock in itself, whether you lose all your money or make a fortune. But nobody seems to realize this. If you lose everything overnight, everyone gives you sympathy. But if you make a great deal of money, no one sympathizes or even seems to understand what a shattering thing has happened to you. I became deeply unhappy, and suspicious of everyone. A poison took possession of me, a kind of sickness (Commire 42).
Commire notes the nature of Chase's work when she w...