DESCRIPTION:
Farmingdale High School Presents "Harvey"
Starring
RYAN GOLDBERG as ELWOOD P. DOWD

CAST:
Ryan Goldberg as...Elwood P. Dowd:
The central character of the play, a friendly eccentric who spends his days and nights in the taverns of his unnamed town. Elwood’s best friend is Harvey, an invisible six and a half-foot-tall rabbit. The play leaves open several possibilities regarding exactly what Harvey is, whether he is a figment of Elwood’s imagination, as the psychiatrists would like to believe, or he is, as Elwood asserts, a supernatural being known as a pooka.

Sabatina Mauro as....Elwood’s sister, Veta Louise Simmons:
An important character in this play because she joins the play’s two opposing forces, logic and imagination.

Shannon Rae as...Myrtle Mae Simmons:
A young woman, the daughter of Veta. The main reason why she and her mother are concerned about their standing in the community is that they both are concerned that Myrtle find a man to marry.

Dominick Raffaele as...Dr. Lyman Sanderson:
Young for a psychiatrist, but very qualified — Dr. Chumley has picked him out of the twelve possible assistants that he tried. He is handsome and just as infatuated with Nurse Kelly as she is with him, but he only reveals his concern indirectly.

Tierney Hesse as...Nurse Ruth Kelly:
A sympathetic character, a pretty young woman who appears to have some sort of love/hate relationship with Dr. Sanderson.

Matthew Nash as...Wilson:
The muscle of Chumley’s Rest, a devoted orderly responsible for handling the patients who will not cooperate voluntarily.

Thomas Murtagh as...Dr. William B. Chumley:
An esteemed psychiatrist and the head of the sanitarium, “Chumley’s Rest,” to which Veta has Elwood taken. He is a difficult, exacting man, feared by his subordinates, unwilling to tolerate his mistakes.

Samantha Silverman as...Ethel Chauvenet:
An old friend of the family. She is a member of the town’s social circle, which Veta wants Myrtle to break into, and so they both flatter her and curry her favor.

Allie Jorge as...Betty Chumley (the doctor's wife):
More concerned with socializing than with science: told that her husband has to examine a patient, she tells him, “Give a little quick diagnosis, Willie — we don’t want to be late to the party.”

Frank Borgi as...Judge Omar Gaffney:
An old family friend of the Dowds, a representative of the people in town who are accustomed to seeing Elwood talking to Harvey and who do not think anything of it.


PLOT (Wikipedia):
Elwood P. Dowd is an affable man who claims to have an unseen (and presumably imaginary) friend Harvey — whom Elwood describes as a six-foot, three-and-one-half-inch tall pooka resembling an anthropomorphic rabbit. Elwood introduces Harvey to everyone he meets. His social-climbing sister, Veta, increasingly finds his eccentric behavior embarrassing. She decides to have him committed to a sanitarium to spare her and her daughter Myrtle Mae from future embarrassment. When they arrive at the sanitarium, a comedy of errors ensues. The young, handsome, and very flirtatious Dr. Sanderson commits Veta instead of Elwood, but when the truth comes out the search is on for Elwood and his invisible companion. When Elwood 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 the staff, including sanitarium director Dr. Chumley. Only just before Elwood is to be given an injection that will make him into a "perfectly normal human being, and you know what bastards they are!" (in the words of a taxi cab driver who has become involved in the proceedings) does Veta realize that she'd rather have Elwood the same as he's always been — carefree and kind — even if it means living with Harvey.