Aging & Wisdom Quote by James Stewart

Stewart is marveling at a particular kind of cultural endurance: the way something that should have expired on paper keeps breathing in front of an audience. The premise he sketches is deliberately absurd - a grown man with a six-foot rabbit for a best friend sounds like mid-century whimsy, the sort of “dated” theatrical conceit modern taste is supposed to outgrow. By saying it that bluntly, he invites us to share his skepticism first, then flips it with the admission that it “caught on.”

The subtext is less about the rabbit than about permission. Harvey is a story where the straight world - status, sanity, conformity - is treated as the real delusion, and the imaginary friend becomes a pressure valve for people trapped inside respectable scripts. Stewart’s surprise at young audiences is the tell. If the play was expected to land as nostalgic comfort for older viewers, the youth response suggests something sharper: even in a supposedly more liberated era, younger people still feel policed by norms, still crave gentleness over performance, still recognize how institutions pathologize difference.

Stewart’s own persona matters here. He made a career out of decency under strain, playing men who look ordinary until the moral stakes rise. So when he calls it “amazing,” it’s not actorly hype; it’s an instinctive read on why a “dated” story works: not because it’s current, but because it’s quietly insurgent. The rabbit is a joke that smuggles in a critique of what we call reality, and who gets punished for refusing to flatter it.