The Brilliant Ralph Fiennes in 'Straight Line Crazy'

I didn't care for the story or the plot, or the character. I paid for a ticket to watch 'Straight Line Crazy' because Ralph Fiennes was the actor. Written by David Hare and produced by Nicholas Hytner, the play opened in March 2022 at Bridge Theatre in London. Esplanade brought in as a screening under the banner of National Theatre, and I was more than happy to watch it. 

Set in the 1920s to 1960s New York City, Ralph Fiennes plays the controversial Robert Moses, an American urban planner and non-elected public official who was a builder of bridges and roads, a powerful mover and shaker in New York City. Robert Moses wasn't well-liked at all. From all accounts, he was a racist and a classist Why pick Robert Moses? In a piece written by Vinson Cunningham in The New Yorker published on October 31, 2022, he explained

“Straight Line Crazy”—the title is a reference to Moses’s compulsive tendency to draw straight lines on maps and then, implausibly, to gather the resources and marshal the bureaucratic will to make them physical facts as roadways—plays out in two longish acts, three decades apart.

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Throughout, Fiennes ably displays Moses’s faults—his stubbornness, his dishonesty, his bullying, his barely veiled prejudices against people of color and the poor—but he also makes him seem a bit like a great, perhaps slightly tortured artist surrounded by dopes. Moses is worried that people don’t like him when they meet him, but we can easily imagine Fiennes’s crafty version of the man winning over a crowd or two.

Of course I didn't exactly care about what type of man Robert Moses was, neither am I affected by his horrible treatment of other people nor am I a beneficiary of his work. Regardless of what he was, he has set the NYC skyline, and created parkways to beaches and parks (Jones Beach State Park) and such, the blocks of residential estates, and of course bridges linking Brooklyn and Queens that we know today. 

I understand that this play is hugely popular in the US. It seems to be relevant in the city's civil activism today too. The same New Yorker article ended with these paragraphs,

Many of today’s urban-policy nerds, who call themselves yimbys—Yes, in My Back Yard—might make the same indictment of Jacobs. At one point, Moses says, astutely, that fashions in urban policy “blow right back in.” He’s right about that; I sense a Moses moment coming, perhaps foreshadowed by this play’s relatively equalizing portrayal of the man. You’d think it would be difficult to dismiss a civic dynamo like Jacobs, but I bet some of these market-oriented yimbys would do just that. Well-meaning citizens seem tired of contending with political bad faith. Why not, then, look to technocratic Caesars like Moses to browbeat the opposition and get things done?

It’s a real fight, happening everywhere, spurred by lowered expectations, foreshortened horizons, and a pervasive feeling of scarcity. Let’s have it out, onstage and everywhere else.

The cast was equally wonderful. I loved the women. As activists against him, and as his aide too, they had such good lines to rebut Robert Moses. Like I said, I watched this show for Ralph Fiennes. I never knew anything about Robert Moses, but the actor got him down pat, and for that 2.5 hours, the actor was a rather hateful Robert Moses. I decided that I don't want to know anything more about Robert Moses.

Ralph Fiennes is truly a brilliant actor. In a long interview with Maureen Dowd for The New York Times published on October 22, 2022, the writer told us what the director said, 

“Ralph’s good at monsters,” said Nicholas Hytner, a director of the play. “He doesn’t approach them sensationally. He tries to understand them.”  

It was Mr. Hytner who suggested that David Hare write the play about Moses for the theater he runs in London, the Bridge, where it opened this spring.

Moses was an American Caesar — a perfect barrel-chested, desk-slapping role for a leading Shakespeare interpreter like Mr. Fiennes.

“I’ve always loved a toxic male,” Mr. Hare said, fondly recalling the 1985 Rupert Murdoch satire, “Pravda,” that he wrote with Howard Brenton. “They’re great for theater, aren’t they?”

Mr. Fiennes likes them, too. Unlike some top American actors, who carefully curate heroic roles, the British actor relishes swimming in moral murkiness, “the gray areas where you can’t easily put a definition.”

Mr. Hytner said of his star: “With Robert Moses, the ability to subordinate his charm to a brutal megalomaniac to the extent that he’s completely unafraid to alienate an audience. That doesn’t go with being a movie star. He makes himself open but he never makes himself too open. He’s one of those actors who is fascinating because he appears to be nursing a secret.”