Director's Notes for "Harvey"

Our next show, "Harvey", opens on Friday, October 2nd. With rehearsals heading into the final week-and-a-half, director Susanna Wilson offers her personal observations on the experience:

As I and this great team of performers, designers, and stagecraft professionals have attacked this project, we have all found that Harvey has truly touched our lives in many ways...despite its inherent silliness.

For a play that was on Broadway for five years (becoming the 35th longest-running show to date), and which later became a famous film starring Jimmy Stewart in 1950, very little is known about Harvey's creator, Mary Coyle Chase. We know that she spent her entire life in Denver, Colorado. We know that she was a newspaper reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, where she was known as "our little Mary". We know that after winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1945 with Harvey, she wrote a subsequent play called Mrs. McThing.

...And that is about it. Mary Chase is, for all intents and purposes, Harvey himself – invisibly pulling the strings of this wacky cast of characters. So is Harvey. As we rehearse the show, we can feel his invisible influence working in our lives – revealing our hidden desires and our true feelings about ourselves. I hope that he will touch your lives, too.

–Susanna Wilson, Director