In January 2022, the actor Ralph Fiennes took a helicopter ride over New York, looking down like a god on the avenues, expressways, and bridges that shape the city’s daily life. He studied the view with care, not as a tourist might, but as preparation to play the man who created much of it all: Robert Moses, once the most powerful urban planner in the world.
“I just wanted to get a sense of the reach of his vision,” says Fiennes from Umbria, Italy, where he’s renting a farmhouse with no Wi-Fi, so he’s at a local café, wearing a loose white shirt open at the neck in the heat. “From all the conversations I have had with New Yorkers, they consider his legacy to be extremely negative. But you can’t go to New York and not benefit from the West Side Highway or Riverside Park. You still use the tunnels and bridges that he built. Of course, the Cross Bronx Expressway is horrendous—it’s a divided legacy. And that is very much addressed in the play.”
The play in question, Straight Line Crazy, headed to New York’s busy, multidisciplinary arts center The Shed in October, is written by the celebrated English playwright David Hare—one of Hare’s rare excursions into American life. Nearly two decades ago, Hare addressed the causes and repercussions of the American invasion of Iraq with Stuff Happens and The Vertical Hour. This time he’s reaching further back into U.S. history to the vision and delusions of a man who transformed midcentury New York. “Who would have thought you could actually make a play about urban planning?” says Hare from Paris, where he spends part of the year with his wife, the former fashion designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi.
The play revolves around two key moments in Moses’s life. The first is in 1926, when we see him driving through his plan to open up Long Island and create Jones Beach State Park, changing the coastline from a playground for established families such as the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys into a recreational amenity for everyone. By 1955, that idealism had soured and Moses’s plan to route a highway through Washington Square was thwarted by a mass protest of local residents, determined to protect their community.
When Hare’s play, directed by Nicholas Hytner, opened in London in March 2022, it was a revelation: huge ideas dealt with in witty, robust, and vivid ways. And it was an education too, introducing a largely ignorant English theatergoing public to the whole idea of Moses. “But in New York,” says Hare, “everyone already has a view about him.”
Architect Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the studio responsible for reimagining some of New York’s most high-profile public spaces, certainly does. “The negative legacy of Robert Moses merits—at the very least—a round of debate,” she says. Diller’s studio notably designed The Shed, and helped to re-create the adjacent High Line—part of Moses’s history and now a site of sky-rocketing gentrification. “It’s hard to ignore the fact that Straight Line Crazy is opening at The Shed, a space that the city reserved for a new, independent cultural entity within a mega-development of soaring towers. Ironically, audiences will be asked to contemplate in very stark terms Moses’s ambiguous legacy amid a city of oscillating values.”
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