King of the City

In Straight Line Crazy, Ralph Fiennes brings Robert Moses to the stage—divided legacy and all.

- Sarah Crompton

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 f rom Paris, where he spends part of the year with his wife, the former fashion designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi.