Bring Down the House

The play Straight Line Crazy, written by David Hare and starring Ralph Fiennes, is ostensibly about Robert Moses, the urban planner, city and state park mogul, highway fetishist, and reformist technocrat par excellence. In fact, Moses here is little more than a vessel through which Hare and by extension bourgeois everywhere attempt to work out a dim sort of self-awareness of their role in twentieth-century history. This would be all well and good if Hare, a seasoned playwright, were capable of such a project; he patently is not. As such what could have been a relatively interesting entry in the overstuffed-to-bursting catalog of media pertaining to the Moses/Jacobs theomachy is instead a ponderous rug-pull played out over two and a half hours.

This slog of a run time is divided into two acts, which find Moses at pivotal points in his career. In the first, set in 1926, he’s an upstart liberal politico flirting dangerously with a sort of democratic populism. As chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission, he proposes a sprawling park system linked by expressways, with Jones Beach at its symbolic center. “This beach could belong to the people!” he exhorts at Henry Vanderbilt in a bare set standing in for a palatial Long Island estate, complete with butler. Vanderbilt (Guy Paul) sputters before finally wilting under Moses’s vigorous (to the point of priapic) denunciation of the irrational torpor of the landed rich and their holdings. It’s unclear what Moses actually wants from the old “baron” other than a captive audience.

This is an ancient drama, ostensibly that of the masses versus the elites. More accurately, it is a furtive recapitulation of the founding myth of the bourgeoisie that sees the progressive radicalism of capital pitted against retrograde landlordism. In Hare’s hands, farce ensues, with Moses playing the young firebrand and America’s great capitalist families—the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Carnegies—recast as atavistic feudal aristocrats. What we get, then, is the exhumation of an ideological fairy tale dressed down in stilted dialogue and lazy research. But no one ever went bankrupt by playing the hits. Returning triumphant to his chairman’s office, Moses slips into the mien of the entrepreneurial genius. The set, now overstuffed with the trappings of white-collar industriousness, also comes furnished with Moses’s lieutenants, Finnuala Connell (Judith Roddy) and Ariel Porter (Adam Silver), who exist solely to be flatfooted by their cocksure boss. There are lots of thundering monologues that Fiennes delivers admirably, even convincingly, though his placeless accent tends to waver. Ahead of the merciful intermission, his Moses basks in his self-assured success, despite having done precisely nothing.

The second act gets going in 1955, the year the Cross Bronx Expressway opened. Moses, now the commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, is the darling of the mayor’s office. The scrappiness of the previous set has been superseded by a throne room of sorts, with an executive desk replacing the long worktable at center stage. Finnuala and Ariel continue to fulfill the role of sentient decor, having now served in this capacity for three decades. But there are wolves at the door, specifically Jane Jacobs (a smarmy Helen Schlesinger, in a minor role) and her Save Washington Square Park Committee, which is inexplicably styled as popular-front insurgency. Jacobs, who ostensibly presides over the committee, addresses the audience directly, occasionally as a narrator.

Moses himself has changed immensely: he now wears a big, boxy suit and, crucially, has been abandoned by the script. Where before he proclaimed, now he incoherently blusters, appearing every bit the brutal planner Robert Caro portrayed him as in The Power Broker. This is fortuitous, because with brief interruptions, the entire second act places critiques of Moses’s person detailed in Caro’s 1977 biography in the mouth of several characters, mainly Finnuala, who has suddenly grown a spine and quits. (Both she and Ariel are plot contrivances, as is Henry Vanderbilt.) Any remaining nuance is pulverized as Moses morphs from quasi-Jacobin to Tucker Carlson culture warrior, such as when he disdainfully refers to Jacobs and his detractors as “women” and “liberals.” To kick the dog, Moses’s personal life has just exploded offstage, and we are told his first wife, Mary Sims, is dying in the hospital. (She didn’t actually die until 1966.) Using 2022 political vernacular, critiques from 1977, and a personal tragedy from 1966, Hare excoriates his main character in 1955.

Straight Line Crazy is far too inept a creation to properly explicate the modernist impulse that Moses represents. So, allow me. The real Moses embodied an ideological reform movement that weaponized rational planning and well-meaning reforms into a great threshing machine by which white capitalists cleared the field for a new round of capital accumulation, poor and minority neighborhoods first. Moses’s “turn” from idealist hero to corrupted butcher is a total fiction. In fact, these two drives were inherent to liberal modernism; they provided its motive force. Profoundly incapable of communicating this, Hare’s script recoils instead into psychodrama and pandering bromides: planning is tyrannical, “community” is essential, “if it happened in the Bronx it could happen here” white fear, and so on. Moses is at war with the authentic, the lifeworld, the oh-so-urban experience of muttering hi to the guy behind the counter at the corner store.

As the lights go down for good, Moses, now a broken monster of stamina, plugs away at his desk. Abandoned by all, he knows nothing else but his work. Capital-R Retribution has been served and we can all clap and laugh and go home knowing that It All Worked Out in the End. You, the theatergoer, are meant to cheer at this bourgeois morality play, at the villain’s ultimate solitude, before taking an Uber home. Thank God we don’t do anything like that anymore, you think.

But if strongmen like Moses are object lessons in authoritarianism and must be avoided, what are we left with? Is it better to allow the less fortunate the illusory possibility of self-improvement, like we do today, than to even think about engaging in the onerousness of direct intervention in the urban environment? The answer won’t be found on this stage.