‘Straight Line Crazy’ Review: Ralph Fiennes Plays Robert Moses in David Hare’s Talky New Play
25.03.2022 - 16:53
/ variety.com
David Benedict “We’ve discussed this. We’ve discussed this many times.” That wearied line, which appears in the final scene of David Hare’s new play “Straight Line Crazy,” is spoken by Ariel Porter (Samuel Barnett), the long-suffering right-hand man to New York’s legendary urban planner Robert Moses (Ralph Fiennes).
But while it serves as a rebuke to Moses, it also sums up the besetting sin of the show now premiering at the Bridge Theatre in London. The play is made up of discussion, often energized by hard-working actors, but while Hare famously fashioned debates around the Iraq War into the invigorating “Stuff Happens,” in “Straight Line Crazy” almost nothing happens.The base material, the story behind Moses’s spectacular rise and fall, is fascinating.
Moses is the singular man who, from the 1920s onwards, radically changed the physical landscape of America, first of Long Island, then Manhattan and then the country. For decades he was an untouchable hero of urban development, designing and building public space “for the people” via the construction of roads that didn’t just carve their way through the U.S., they reconfigured it.
As one of the characters announces, anyone driving on a road that is an expressway is on a road designed by Moses. But after a near 40-year career, Moses’s fall from was grace not just a personal loss but a symbol of a massive American socio-political change, with attitudes about race, power and class undergoing a seismic shift.
Moses’s failure, as Hare is keen to underline, is not about design, it’s his arrogant refusal to understand, let alone embrace, the changed tenor of his times. Consciously or not — the play is interestingly ambivalent on this point — he spent decades ignoring the
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