Theatre in Review: Straight Line Crazy (London Theatre Company at the Shed)

	Ralph Fiennes. Photo: Kate Glicksberg.

Playing urban planner Robert Moses, Ralph Fiennes is his own bulldozer, razing, with equal relish, city blocks and people, all in the name of progress. If his opponents' names are Vanderbilt or Whitney, so much the better. A committee of dissenters from Greenwich Village is dismissed as "a group of minstrels and artistic women with handbags." Eleanor Roosevelt? He freely admits he'd like to bop her one. Planting his feet in the widest possible stance, pushing out his chest like a shield, hands parked on hips, Fiennes is the bureaucrat as pugilist, a rough-and-ready results man who has no use for handwringing, let alone legal or moral niceties. The object of the game is to make a plan and get it done. "The dynamo of capitalism is restlessness," he says. That goes double for the dynamo inside him.

In Straight Line Crazy, which owes much to Robert Caro's indispensable biography The Power Broker, Moses cheerfully drops in on Henry Vanderbilt, announcing his plan to pave a road through the great man's Long Island property. He hasn't the slightest compunction about starting a construction project before the government has signed off on it. "Once you sink that first stake, they'll never make you pull it up," he tells a shocked associate. Stuck with a fine of $22,000, he pays it (with a little help from his mother) and keeps on barreling ahead. (Forever haunting him is the memory of an earlier, failed career as a government reformer; he has tried following the rules, thank you, what did it get him?) Faced with a lawsuit over his frankly illegal actions, he cozens Governor Al Smith into testifying for him -- also taking the judge out for lunch and softening him up. Smith, no stranger to chutzpah, admits, "It seems incredible to me that I once wanted to put in charge of prisons someone who doesn't know the meaning of the words 'repeat offender'."

At first, anyway, all these shenanigans are intended to give ordinary New Yorkers a break from city life. "The people have discovered a new occupation," Moses insists. "It's called leisure. And one day it will be as popular as work." Even at this early stage, however, his parks and beaches are designed only for automobile-driving members of the middle class. Quietly casting aside plans for mass transportation, he keeps the urban poor, especially Blacks and Hispanics, out of the picture. Later, having already wiped out dozens of working-class neighborhoods to create the Cross-Bronx Expressway, he plans to lay a four-lane highway down Fifth Avenue, splitting Washington Square in half, a controversial move that is only the prelude to a monstrous scheme that would reduce Manhattan to a highway rest stop.

Faced with a titanic character who exerted an unprecedented level on influence on New York State for forty years, Fiennes commandeers the stage, leaving everyone else in the background. Addicted to "the incorruptible pleasure of being right" (his words), and "high on unpopularity" (according to a disenchanted employee), he works his vocal instrument like a pipe organ -- bullying and/or coaxing others and reveling in his intoxicating vision of a city run by rational principles. Moses may be an avatar of modernism but, in playing him, the actor he seems to be reaching back to the grandstanding, grand-manner acting styles of an earlier era. It may be the only way to make this outrageous character plausible.

Straight Line Crazy got a rather mixed press in London, where audiences may have been baffled by the inside baseball of New York politics. (I can imagine them scratching their heads over, say, the Throgs Neck Bridge.) And, in truth, without Fiennes' electrifying presence, one might more easily notice the play's many structural weaknesses. The first act takes place in 1926, when Moses, assembling a team of young acolytes, is pushing through Jones Beach State Park, arguably his greatest achievement. Act II unfolds in 1955 when, facing organized pushback to the Fifth Avenue plan, he finally -- in his mid-sixties -- tastes the bitter fruits of defeat. (As one associate notes, "He'd taken on a far deadlier enemy -- the one no one ever beats," meaning the middle classes.) But bridging this three-decade time gap requires enormous amounts of exposition, an approach that sometimes has a flattening effect on the dialogue. ("You're doing everything you can. But the forces of reaction are strong.") Playwright David Hare even resorts to having Moses detail his Manhattan highway plan to an irritated right-hand man, who says, "We've discussed this. We've discussed it many times." Yes, but we weren't there to hear about it. Other things are carelessly handled: Vague references to Moses' neglect of his wife results in a revelation about her drinking that arrives too late to have much impact. And certain characters are rather too obviously positioned; for example, the first time we see Mariah, a young, Black architect from the Bronx, it is only too obvious that she will shoulder the case for the prosecution.

Still, Moses is a riveting character and there's never a dull moment as long as Fiennes is at center stage, plotting, raging, and brooking no criticism. Aside from Danny Webb, whose Al Smith is more like the mayor of Dublin than governor of New York State, the solid supporting cast includes Guy Paul as Vanderbilt, offended at the thought of all those hordes from Manhattan invading his private space; Adam Silver as Fiennes' most loyal (and tight-lipped) supporter; Alana Maria as Shirley Hayes, the real-life leader of the Greenwich Village coalition; Alisha Bailey, poised and pointed in her accusations as Mariah; and Helen Schlesinger as Jane Jacobs, the journalist who crystallized the case against Moses, only to see Greenwich Village become an enclave for the wealthy. Standing out by far is Judith Roddy as Moses' closest associate and most persistent conscience. The role is a bit of a cliché -- the woman who sacrifices personal happiness to stand by her boss -- but there's plenty going on behind her polished, professional façade. She holds her own against the force field that is Moses, ultimately delivering a powerful psychological blow when the time comes for settling personal and professional accounts.

Directors Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage mostly keep everyone out of Fiennes' way; they also make rather odd use of the production's thrust stage, favoring the center block of audience seating at the expense of those on the sides. But there is something in the depth and amplitude of Bob Crowley's set that seems only fitting for Moses, especially when the designer fills it with architectural models. (His costumes do a solid job of delineating the play's time frames.) Jessica Hung Han Yung's lighting and George Dennis' sound are both highly efficient, although George Fenton's incidental music is a little too Hollywood-sententious; at times, it almost seems to be mocking the play's subject.

If Straight Line Crazy creaks a little, Hare has put onstage a fascinating chapter of New York history -- and in a moment when so many seem to prefer strongmen as their political leaders, he gives us something to think about. (On another day, we can discuss the irony of presenting a play about the potential disastrous effects of urban planning at Hudson Yards, a characterless development that many consider to be blot on the city's skyline.) And Fiennes' incarnation of Moses, in all his idealism and power lust, is one for the books. What would New York be like today if Robert Moses had gotten everything he wanted? It gives one chills to think about it. --David Barbour