Written by David Hare
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
Starring Ralph Feinnes, Danny Webb, Siobhán Cullen, and Alisha Bailey
Performed at the Bridge Theatre, London, 2022
Robert Moses (1888–1981) was no ordinary public official. Over the course of fifty years, he held at least twelve unelected government positions in the city and state of New York, many of them chairing agencies created at his instigation. Through these positions, he directed and oversaw the transformation of New York into a city of the car, creating some 650 miles of new highways. He passionately believed in “urban renewal,” ordering the relocation of people from poor-quality tenement housing to housing projects further from the city, and planning hundreds of acres of new parks across the region. Moses unquestionably was visionary, determined to realize his grand plans and undeterred by naysayers. Sadly, that determination extended to violating individual rights; he used government power both to seize land from wealthy landowners in Long Island and to bulldoze poor inner-city communities in the Bronx, forcibly displacing thousands of residents.
In the new play, Straight Line Crazy, David Hare brings Moses’s life back into the public eye, vividly depicting the planner’s contempt for the people who happened to be in the way of his vision. Ralph Fiennes (Schindler’s List, Harry Potter) plays Moses as a temperamental schemer, obsessed with his plans and prone to fly off the handle whenever something doesn’t go his way. When the governor of New York suggests that one of his roads be rerouted around an apple orchard after its owner protested the seizure of his land, Moses passionately rants that the road is for the good of everyone and “if a few fences get kicked over in the process, does it really matter?”
The play excellently captures his disregard for individual rights. When some challenge Moses on the harm he is causing, they identify his actions as “violence” and “force”—accurately capturing the nature of such government projects, which depend on the state’s monopoly on force, and its misuse of that monopoly, to trample people’s rights. Moses often argues that he is working for the people and cares about democracy but that the people don’t know what they want until someone (him, an unelected planner) provides it. This exemplifies a contradiction Frédéric Bastiat observed in the ideas of those who support government interventionism: that everyone should have a say in how the country is run but not the freedom to decide how to live their own lives.
Fiennes excels in his performance as Moses, bringing to life the character’s boundless energy and projecting an almost constantly aggressive demeanor that leaves those around him both in awe of his resolve and terrified to speak against him. Even so, Fiennes’s performance has a degree of vulnerability, including several points where Moses shares emotive moments with his staff, the closest thing he has to friends. Moses is a man married to his work, often at the expense of his own happiness and relationships.
Despite his brilliant performance, Fiennes doesn’t upstage the rest of the cast. Danny Webb (Alien 3, Doctor Who) is hilarious as the bombastic Governor Al Smith, and Siobhán Cullen gives a standout performance as Moses’s overwhelmed assistant, Finnaula. All of the acting is top quality, even if the British cast sometimes struggles to pull off convincing New York accents.
Although the play depicts real historical figures and is based on true events, it also includes some invented characters and employs artistic license to convey its message. The lead campaigner against Moses’s plan to put a new road through the middle of Washington Square Park, Jane Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger), is a real historic figure. But Hare also uses new characters to depict what many consider to be Moses’s contempt for black people, and others to imply he held similar contempt for women—and even the disabled.
There is no question that Moses’s rights violations had a massive, detrimental impact on black communities in New York. Many of his roads tore through the centers of the city’s poorest communities, with mostly black or Hispanic populations, and some, including Moses’s biographer, Robert Caro, held that this was intentional. The play treats this with the seriousness it deserves, but it portrays his earlier seizures from wealthy landowners, such as the Vanderbilts and Morgans, with a sense of levity on the assumption that the takings were somehow justified. Moses is shown to meet one of these aristocrats, an invented extra member of the Vanderbilt family, who is depicted as entitled and dismissive of the poor, leaving the audience feeling as though Moses would be justified in trampling his rights.
Unfortunately, the play seems to prioritize “social justice” questions of race, gender, and “inequality.” Race and gender issues are relevant to an exploration of Moses and his work—his decision to design his roads to be impassable by buses, for example, made them virtually unusable to the poor people whose homes he destroyed to build them—and the play is right to raise these matters. But the essence of Moses’s injustice was his disregard for individual rights, whatever the skin color, gender, or wealth of his victims, and the way the play treats his actions differently depending on these somewhat obscures the fundamental issue.
Despite this, Straight Line Crazy does an excellent job of bringing to modern audiences the harsh reality of how governments, even in wealthy, developed countries, can ride roughshod over people’s rights, rich and poor alike. It does so while also presenting an enjoyable, often funny, character story, with many of the laughs centering on Moses’s own apparent obliviousness to what others think of him and his plans. David Hare deserves credit for shining a light on Moses’s story and creating a high-quality piece of dramatic theater in the process.
Straight Line Crazy is currently performing at the Bridge Theatre, London, and will go on tour across other National Theatre Live venues in the United Kingdom later in 2022.
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