BULLET REVIEW — STRAIGHT LINE CRAZY

By David Hare, now in previews at the Griffin Theater at Hudson Yards

Straight Line Crazy, a new play about Robert Moses by David Hare, runs for 2 ½ hours but it did not feel too long because of Ralph Fiennes’ riveting stage charisma and multilayered, nuanced portrayal of Moses and his evolution from a young human earth mover to broken tortured soul.

In Act 1 we meet Moses in 1926 as a force of nature taking on the Gilded Age aristocracy of Nassau County to build highways to public beaches on Long Island. The second act set in 1965 introduces us to the seeds of Moses’ downfall when his plan to build a highway through Washington Square Park runs into an obstacle he had not yet encountered — pissed off middle class white people including Jane Jacobs and ultimately Eleanor Roosevelt. The nail in the coffin of that project was the disclosure of his secret plan to destroy SoHo with a crosstown expressway.

I don’t like admitting that I never read Robert Caro’s, The Power Broker, Robert Moses and The Fall of New York. It would have helped but ultimately didn’t matter because the central character of this composite of fictionalized historical moments is twentieth century New York City and the parks, highways, bridges and tunnels that Moses built while decimating neighborhoods, like the South Bronx.

The play’s core conflict is defined by the counter balancing historic role of Jane Jacobs, the grass roots activist who led the fight to save Washington Square Park. She had an alternate vision of the city, not as a crossroads to more desirable places, but as a home to communities to be celebrated and nurtured. Helen Schlesinger plays Jacobs with just the right touch of thoughtful, fearless humility. It is a skillful portrayal of a grassroots activist, mother and big picture thinker whose feet were firmly planted on the ground she was fighting for.

Jacobs was the conceptual counterweight to Moses’ prevailing ethos of the 1960s that the only solution to urban poverty and the future of urban America was the bulldozer. To give us the message that Jacobs was not about ego we are introduced to her as just one of the activists rising from her seat in a line of chairs to speak at meetings. This device makes it clear that the play is not about a clash between two titans but rather between two era defining opposing visions of what cities should be. The portrayal of the Greenwich Village community meetings and of the other activists felt too thin and tangential. We long for more of Jacobs’ thought provoking monologues about how cities should be envisioned.

As the play closes we get a particularly resonating, imagined comment, by Jacobs looking back on her fight to save SoHo only to see it become a rich playground and one of most expensive pieces of real estate on earth.

The legacy of Robert Moses resonates in the daily life of this city. In a program note Chief Executive Producer Madani Younis invites the audience to several public programs about Robert Moses exploring the issue of, “how power moves in our cities today, intersecting with historically vulnerable communities”.

The play opens on 34th Street as New York attempts to impose congestion pricing on traffic below 60th Street. The current battle to reverse the sclerotic, air poisoning impact of cars in Manhattan is a fortuitous historic coda to the story of Moses’ obsessive love affair, with the automobile and highways as a cure for urban woes.