Ralph Fiennes Takes On Robert Moses’ Twisted Legacy in “Straight Line Crazy”
Photo from “Straight Line Crazy” Website
The opinions reflected in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.
It’s not very often that something as dry and dull as the history of urban planning becomes the hot topic of New York culture magazines. This December, however, marks the finale of the two-month running of “Straight Line Crazy”, a play written by David Hare and directed by Nicholas Hytner on the legacy of the one and only Robert Moses. Urban planning may be boring, but Robert Moses is certainly not. Moses, a larger-than-life enigma of a man captured for the stage by British star Ralph Fiennes, is portrayed as an eccentric genius of a builder hampered by the inconveniences of American democracy.
As part of a class at The King’s College, my classmates and I were all excited to see Moses, who died in 1981, brought to life on stage by famed British actor Ralph Fiennes. You might know Fiennes for his dark, morally grey portrayals of a Nazi prison guard in “Schindler’s List” and Voldemort in the Harry Potter films.
“‘Straight Line Crazy’ relies on the acting expertise of Ralph Fiennes and leaves the rest behind,” said Bethany Johnson, a senior in the House of Susan B. Anthony. “By fast-tracking through Moses’ forty years in city planning, the play does little to respect history and complexity. It skims the surface of Moses’ life and how New York came to be the city it is today.”
Moses’ impact on New York City is hard to overstate. According to Robert Caro’s book “The Power Broker,” he built the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Triborough Bridge (also called the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) and five other major bridges linking the city together. He built 15 expressways and a series of parkways totaling 627 miles in the city and its suburbs. He built 658 playgrounds in the city, the magnificent Jones Beach on Long Island and many other parks and beaches around the state. He was a driving force behind the creation of Lincoln Center, the United Nations headquarters and Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, which hosts the New York Mets and the U.S. Open.
However, Moses’ legacy has a darker side: the 250,000 people evicted to build his expressways; the 250,000 additional people, overwhelmingly Black, Hispanic and poor, that Caro estimated were evicted for Moses’ non-highway public works; the evidence of racism, cronyism and corruption in Moses’ approach to “getting things done.” That controversial history makes Moses a rich character for analysis, which is what the play attempts to capture.
As the play opens, the audience sees the more benevolent side of Moses’ character as he seeks to open up parkways into Long Island to create the area’s first major public beach.
“The play opens on Moses in his Long Island Parks Commissioner position in 1926 fighting with a rich Long Island man over road property,” said Lauren Brooks, an NYCJ semester student. “This was intentional, as it shows Moses’ beginning as a fighter for the people and parks, something seen as unarguably good and apolitical — which reflected Moses’ reputation before he grew ‘straight line crazy.’”
However, it isn’t long before the play takes a distinctly different direction and begins portraying Moses in his headquarters as a power-hungry tyrant.
“His ruthless nature is displayed as his assistants watch idly as Moses begins grabbing up land without a care in the world on whom he would displace in the process,” said Sofia Valdez, a senior in the House of Sojourner Truth. “The assistants can be compared to the easels on display, standing in the background while Moses' ruthless and domineering character animates his actions.”
In the play, the narrating character Jane Jacobs calls Moses and his road-building engineers “straight line crazy,” tearing through neighborhoods to build highways and expressways. In reality, Jacobs never said those words. It was Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, wife of the publisher of The New York Times, who told Caro that “engineers are straight-line crazy” in an interview for “The Power Broker.”
That’s one of the smaller ways that the production plays with history. Although inspired by “The Power Broker” and other historical works, the play takes poetic license by introducing a slew of fictional characters and historically inaccurate elements to the story.
The one and only driving force of the story is the characters – Robert Moses features, of course, but his real-life foil Jane Jacobs also serves as one of several female narrators to the audience. Unfortunately for the playwrights, every good narrative requires a climax. The unfortunate fact of history is that Moses and Jacobs never met. A proper climactic duel of words and wills would most certainly have made the play more interesting, especially since the writers had taken more than a few licenses on Moses’ story already.
Being a former amateur stage manager myself, the physical arrangement of the production was of particular interest to me. As a young Moses stands on an empty stage at the very beginning of the performance, chest puffed out and chin up high, the spotlights cast his shadow across the floorboards of the stage in all directions. The setup of the lights and stage made crystal-clear what the centerpiece of the show was — Moses himself.
Even if the writers didn’t do a great job, the acting was incredible. My classmates and I could almost forget all the gross inaccuracies as we listened to Fiennes belt his lines in a mostly convincing rendition of an American accent.
“One must applaud Fiennes’ flawless portrayal of Robert Moses,” said Johnson. “His towering and menacing body language embedded in his charismatic and booming persona that Robert Caro continually comments on in his autobiography of Moses pulls through in Fiennes’ acting.”
Marshall McLuhan famously said that “the medium is the message" — and that message could be applied to The Shed, the new theater in Hudson Yards hosting “Straight Line Crazy.” Ignacio Dominiguez, an NYCJ semester student, noted how “ironic it is that the play is being performed in Hudson Yards, an area with an immensely affluent population and designed with luxury high rises. The area… screamed wealth. One review said Hudson Yards would be the modern version of a Moses development, and I think it’s true.”
At the end of Act II, an older Moses once again stands on the stage, all lights and eyes on him as he utters the final words of his grand performance. His chest is still puffed out, but his chin isn’t lifted quite as high as before. The stage also has one key difference: there is an oversized map of the five boroughs laid across the floorboards and beneath Moses’ feet. All pieces of the Moses office set had been cleared away except for this one. In the literal and metaphorical sense, Robert Moses’ shadow is cast over New York City.
Thus, this theatrical performance was just that – merely theater. It served an excellent purpose of sparking conversation, but anyone looking for history should just read “The Power Broker” instead.
“Straight Line Crazy” is currently running at The Shed Theater until Dec. 18.
Melinda Huspen is the Campus Editor of the Empire State Tribune. She is a junior at The King’s College studying Journalism, Culture and Society.