Pulling a rabbit out of his hat

“Harvey” is the story of Elwood P. Dowd, a sweet-natured innocent who lives to spread conviviality and a kind-hearted philosophy -- and of Harvey, the invisible, 6-foot-plus white rabbit who is Dowd’s constant companion and guide.

The comedy ran seven years on Broadway, starting in 1944, and won the Pulitzer Prize for author Mary Coyle Chase. When director Antoinette Perry died less than two years after “Harvey” opened, the play’s cachet contributed to her being memorialized as namesake of the Tony Awards.

The rabbit isn’t the only large, unseen presence to be reckoned with in a revival of “Harvey.” There’s also the lingering aura of James Stewart, who starred in the 1950 film version of the play, then returned to the part during the 1970s on stage and television. Stewart’s trademark decency and affability dovetailed with Dowd’s, and it became one of his signature roles -- to the point where fans who encountered him often would ask where Harvey was and how he was doing. Stewart, who died in 1997, said he always replied, in a friendly, respectful way, that he would be sure to pass along their regards.

But for Charles Durning, the newest Elwood P. Dowd, that’s immaterial. Durning is an old-movie buff -- and a Jimmy Stewart admirer -- who says he never caught Stewart in “Harvey.” He’s not about to rush to a video store now. Whatever he does on stage in the Broadway-bound production that started its shakedown run this weekend at the Laguna Playhouse, it’s going to be free of that imposing influence.

“I’ve seen him in just about everything else,” Durning says when asked about Stewart before a recent rehearsal. “He’s wonderful.”

His white hair, round belly and persona-shifting capabilities have made Durning one of the top character actors of the past 30 years. His film credits include a corrupt cop in “The Sting,” an earnest one in “Dog Day Afternoon,” a gallant, if clueless, suitor to Dustin Hoffman’s transvestite in “Tootsie” and a slick Texas governor in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” He mastered his craft playing Shakespearean clowns in a 12-year tenure at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival; Papp lauded him for “an earthiness and brilliance that endeared him to Festival audiences.”

Durning was nearly 50 when he had his breakthrough in 1972 playing a desperate small-town politician in the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play “That Championship Season.” He won a Tony of his own in 1990, playing Big Daddy opposite Kathleen Turner in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Now comes the sweetness of “Harvey,” after his off-Broadway turn last fall in the Al Pacino-led revival of a much different play that premiered during World War II, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” Bertolt Brecht’s acid parable about Adolf Hitler’s ascent.

Durning is a former dancer and a judo expert whose nascent stage career was interrupted in 1944 by a heroic but horror-filled tour of duty as an infantryman in World War II. His combat experience began with the D-day landing on Omaha Beach and ended after he had barely survived the Battle of the Bulge, sustaining multiple bayonet and gunshot wounds and earning a Silver Star for valor.

Wearing a tan cardigan sweater over a shamrock green T-shirt, he walks carefully, with a bit of a shuffle, and seats himself gingerly. He speaks quietly and seriously, sometimes not far above a murmur. At 80, he remains a driven performer who craves work and says he feels stranded whenever there’s downtime between parts. Durning says he never cultivated deep interests outside his profession; he reads hungrily, watches old films on cable, plays in a weekly low-stakes poker game that counts comedians Jan Murray and Shecky Green among the regulars, and waits for the next part. Some 200 stage and 150 screen roles have come his way.

Vaudevillian inspired

If there is an invisible actor hovering over his Elwood P. Dowd, Durning says, it is Frank Fay, the vaudevillian who originated the role on Broadway to great acclaim.

Watching Fay more than 50 years ago, Durning was amazed how the actor could make him picture the rabbit as if it really were there. He hopes to do the same for today’s audiences. For Charles Nelson Reilly, an old friend of Durning who is directing the revival, Fay’s rendition of Dowd holds a special place: “Harvey” was the first play Reilly saw while working as a teenage usher in Hartford, Conn. Fay’s performance “inspired me to try to be an actor,” he says.

Loyal to that memory, Reilly deliberately has skipped seeing James Stewart in “Harvey.” When it comes to facing the anxiety of Stewart’s influence, the director-actor team benefits from blissful ignorance.

Durning learned the hard way how not to play Dowd. Early in his career, he attempted the part in summer stock in New York state and got fired. He says his downfall was trying to milk each line for laughs. “And I probably didn’t believe in the rabbit, either, at that time. But now I do, and I see where my mistakes were.”

Believing in the rabbit, Durning says, means believing in belief. He sees “Harvey” not just as a piece of comic whimsy launched between D-day and the Battle of the Bulge to help people forget the war for a few hours, but as a show that makes serious philosophical points. For Durning, the rabbit is a metaphor for the possibility of a spiritual presence in human affairs. Those who are open and receptive, like Dowd, earn the company of an invisible, intangible something -- a sustaining belief that can suffuse their lives with contentment and grace. To those with harder heads and more worldly agendas, which would include nearly everybody else in the play, Dowd’s walk with an unseen presence seems a lunatic absurdity.

Durning speaks as a former hard head -- and something of a hard case -- who grew up in New York desperately poor, struggled for everything, was described by his mentor Papp as a “stocky, tough Irishman,” and learned only in midlife the wisdom of one of Dowd’s most memorable speeches: “My mother used to say to me ... ‘in this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ For years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

“In my youth I was belligerent,” Durning says. “I never had a drink in my life, but I was aggressive and ready to pick up on anything I thought was an insult. I wasn’t very well-liked.” Nowadays he inclines more toward Elwood P.’s equanimity and goodwill. He says nothing riles him except racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism.

He credits Mary Ann Durning, his wife of 30 years, with mellowing him. They were high school sweethearts who went separate ways, married others, had children, divorced and reconnected during the run of “That Championship Season.” It’s ironic, and a little sad, then, that Durning’s unending drive to perform often means long separations from his wife and their high-rise apartment in Westwood.

“She knew she married a gypsy, and she’s a stay-at-home,” he says. He doesn’t expect her to come to New York should “Harvey” succeed on Broadway. A triumph there will mean living apart from her in a hotel for months on end. Spousal contact will be “strictly by telephone,” as it was during the long tour of “The Gin Game” he did with Julie Harris in the late 1990s. “It’s tough. I miss her a lot, because she’s an up person, always.”

Lobbying for the lead

Durning almost didn’t get the chance to challenge people’s memories of Jimmy Stewart. Producer Don Gregory, who will move the show to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre in late September, first hired him as Dr. Chumley, director of the asylum where Dowd’s sister tries to commit him. As other high-profile candidates approached for the lead role fell out, including Dick Van Dyke, Dick Cavett and John Larroquette, Durning lobbied for the part. Gregory says it took a while -- and the urging of Reilly, who had directed Durning in “The Gin Game” -- for him to see the short, round actor as the confidante of the big, white bunny. “I was guilty of stereotype casting, thinking of somebody like a Jimmy Stewart,” says Gregory, who saw Stewart play Dowd in the film of “Harvey” and on stage. Eventually, he agreed with Reilly that “we should make a dent in the stereotype.”

Gregory admits that Durning strikes some as an odd choice, given the common assumption that Stewart owns the role. Indeed, the producer, who bought the rights to “Harvey” in 1993, says that a more conventional, handsome nice-guy leading man, John Travolta, has been cast as Dowd for a film version in development by Miramax. But he urges audiences not to prejudge whether Durning can pull it off. “He is a wonderful actor in anything he does.”

For Gregory, the play’s celebration of sweet fantasy and gentle selflessness goes against the grain of contemporary culture. Dowd’s admonition that it’s better to be “pleasant” than “smart” could seem hopelessly dated and naive.

“This is a very troubled time when everybody is so cynical,” Gregory says. “This is a play about love and hope. It’s not so easy to do in this atmosphere, but I wanted to because I think it’s a beacon of what we need to have.”

Durning isn’t concerned with how “Harvey” might play against the ironic spirit of the times. “You can do that if you want, but I’m not drawing any parallels. I’m at that point in my career where you play for honesty, you don’t play for what the audience wants to see or hear.” It comes down, he says, to pulling the rabbit out of a hat -- to making crowds look into thin air, yet think they see what Elwood P. Dowd sees.

You can sense the respect Durning has for that mission and its challenges by the way he phrases it: “If I don’t do my job,” he says, “they’re not going to believe.”