“Harvey” by Mary Chase: The Pulitzer Prize winning play about 47-year-old man with six-foot-tall rabbit—and the rabbit’s family—as imaginary companions.

Past posts—search “The Story of Ruth,” “Visual Hallucinations,” and “animal alters”—reminded me of the Pulitzer Prize winning play “Harvey” by Mary Chase, which is about a 47-year-old man, Elwood P. Dowd, who has a rational, talking, six-foot-tall rabbit as an imaginary companion. I must have once seen the movie, and I just read the play.

For an introduction to the play and its author, click these two links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(play)

http://irishamerica.com/2016/10/mary-chase-the-woman-behind-harvey/

The line in the play that most caught my attention comes at the end, when Elwood says, “Doctor, for years I’ve known what my family thinks of Harvey. But I’ve often wondered what Harvey’s family thinks of me” (1, p. 71).

The line is a non sequitur. I don’t recall anything in the play that had suggested Harvey had a family. And there is no apparent reason for that fact to be suddenly revealed, in passing, without explanation, at the play’s end.

Since I interpret Harvey as representing an alternate personality, the reference to Harvey’s “family” suggests the presence of multiple personalities.

1. Mary Chase. Harvey: A Comedy in Three Acts [1944]. Snowball Publishing.