In a new play about Robert Moses, the actor Ralph Fiennes ably embodies Moses’s faults—his stubbornness, his dishonesty—but Moses also comes across a bit like a tortured artist surrounded by dopes.
The biggest surprise of “Straight Line Crazy,” David Hare’s new play about the tsarist urban planner Robert Moses, is that it originated in London, where it received good reviews, earlier this year, at the Bridge Theatre. Moses is best known as the builder of a preponderance of New York City’s highways, and as the subject of Robert Caro’s masterly biography “The Power Broker.
“Straight Line Crazy”—the title is a reference to Moses’s compulsive tendency to draw straight lines on maps and then, implausibly, to gather the resources and marshal the bureaucratic will to make them physical facts as roadways—plays out in two longish acts, three decades apart. The first is set in the nineteen-twenties, when Moses is just beginning to wield influence, and planning to open Jones Beach to the public, making it possible to get there by the new Southern State Parkway.
The play’s fuel is Moses’s overconfident machismo, but it’s punctuated and given its structure by monologues from women. Sometimes they’re delivered in an Irish lilt, by Finnuala Connell , a longtime aide to Moses who, in the first act, is portrayed as cautiously curious, then captivated by Moses’s brilliance, but in the second act becomes disillusioned. Jane Jacobs delivers speeches, too, providing a lyrical counterpoint to Moses’s coldhearted toughness.
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