DAVID HARE’s Straight Line Crazy (The Shed, 2022) - dir. by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage with Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses
Classic subscribers’ theater. Nothing here is creative or surprising. The writing is almost all expository - characters talking about traffic (and bridges and highways) but having very little to say to each other. The acting leans a little heavily on accents and period mannerisms - Ralph Fiennes’ tin man of Robert Moses seems constantly in need of his oil can. But the subject matter is interesting, the writing professional, the acting stately - the play grew on me; was a perfectly enjoyable night of theater.
The question in my mind is: could it have been done differently? The text leans heavily into Roman comparisons and with good reason - there’s the sense with Moses that he saw himself as a super-professional master technician, answerable ultimately to the state as opposed to the people, building a system of highways that would last for centuries much as the Roman roads or aqueducts did - and I could imagine a more ambitious playwright, Mike Bartlett for instance, playing completely into the Roman idea, writing the play in hexameter or something. Or I could imagine a series of very intimate, intense exchanges on the nature of power, something along the lines of Marat/Sade, a kind of Robert Moses dreamscape somewhere in the heart of power.
The rendition of the Moses story in Straight Line Crazy plays it all very safe - Hare is an old pro reaching into his bag of tricks and he thinks he has enough to sustain a full drama through the theme of ambiguity. On the one hand, there’s Moses in his crusading mode in the 1920s, steamrolling necessary public works past patrician opposition. And then there’s Moses in the ’60s - same guy working in the same office with the same people, the same unflagging drive - but now representing the forces of repression, heavy-handed institutional energy crushing the life blood of the city. As his long-suffering assistant Finnuala puts it, Moses had a vision as a young man and then got completely locked into it and simply lacked any ability to adapt with the times or to recognize that the collateral damage of his vision may have actually been more impactful than its benefits.
I appreciated Hare’s decision to give the last word to Moses. If none of the interactions in the play really have any dramatic tension (the Robert Moses v. Jane Jacobs conflict doesn’t really pay off given that they were never in the same room at the same time, and Moses’ complex dynamic with Al Smith is played largely for laughs, and all the other ‘scenes’ seem mostly to be expository vehicles for stuffing in various pieces of information about Moses’ cityscape-altering projects), Moses as a through-line remains an arresting idea. Moses opens the play by discussing his Herculean swimming feats and closes it the same way - as an urban planning corollary to Roy Cohn’s dictum that there is the path of being nice and the path of being effective - with the not-so-easy-to-refute claim that he had staked out an utterly unique path, as visionary and civil servant, “a once in a generation great builder” and that the normal rules of morality and of the democratic process did not apply to him. That he swam out farther than anybody else was willing to go - and when that became questionable, dangerous, swam still farther. And that only somebody with that sort of disregard for self and others is capable of effecting any meaningful change.