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 from Paris, where he spends part of the year with his wife, the former fashion designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi.
The play revolves around two key moments in Moses’s life. The first is in 1926, when we see him driving through his plan to open up Long Island and create Jones Beach State Park, changing the coastline from a playground for established families such as the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys into a recreational amenity for everyone. By 1955, that idealism had soured and Moses’s plan to route a highway through Washington Square was thwarted by a mass protest of local residents, determined to protect their community.
When Hare’s play, directed by Nicholas Hytner, opened in London in March 2022, it was a revelation: huge ideas dealt with in witty, robust, and vivid ways. And it was an education too, introducing a largely ignorant English theatergoing public to the whole idea of Moses. “But in New York,” says Hare, “everyone already has a view about him.”
Architect Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the studio responsible for reimagining some of New York’s most high-profile public spaces, certainly does. “The negative legacy of Robert Moses merits—at the very least—a round of debate,” she says. Diller’s studio notably designed The Shed, and helped to re-create the adjacent High Line—part of Moses’s history and now a site of sky-rocketing gentrification. “It’s hard to ignore the fact that Straight Line Crazy is opening at The Shed, a space that the city reserved for a new, independent cultural entity within a mega-development of soaring towers. Ironically, audiences will be asked to contemplate in very stark terms Moses’s ambiguous legacy amid a city of oscillating values.”
Fiennes is also anticipating a reaction. “Traditionally New York audiences are much more vocal and expressive. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a more live-wire response from people, with people cheering on the young Black architect who challenges Moses in the second half of the play. I do hope so. When I read the play, my first thought was, I hope we can take this to New York.”
Hare and Fiennes have been working together for more than 20 years, ever since Hare cast Fiennes in his version of Chekhov’s Ivanov, and then later in his adaptation of Ibsen’s The Master Builder opposite Succession’s Sarah Snook (a play with obvious echoes here). But what Fiennes describes as their “creative friendship” was cemented when they collaborated on The White Crow, Fiennes’s 2018 film about the early years of the dancer Rudolf Nureyev. “It was thrilling to be close to his brilliant mind,” says Fiennes warmly. “I think he’s one of the most humane and sensitive people I know.”
In 2020, Fiennes embodied Hare in Beat the Devil, the playwright’s monologue about his own serious bout of COVID and his fury at the British government’s reaction to the pandemic. “I think he enjoyed what I did,” says Fiennes, with a sudden broad smile. “I tried not to mimic him but just to let the bits of the David that I knew come to me. It was a sketch.”
For Hare, Fiennes “connects me to the classical tradition of heroic acting of my youth. It isn’t so much that I write for him, as that when I’ve written, it sort of seems absolutely inevitable that he’s right.” He pauses, looking back over a career that has included Plenty, Skylight, and Amy’s View—plays with huge roles for women at their heart—and then laughs. “Having spent my whole life campaigning for the role of women onstage, I am pleased to say that now as the culture is changing, I am as ever out of step. I was out of step when I was writing these walloping great women’s roles, and I am now out of step, writing these walloping great men’s roles.”
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It’s something Fiennes appreciates. “David writes dubious men very, very well. He writes the flaws of the male. And he’s very good at writing male characters who are a mixture of vanity, idealism, a kind of self-knowledge, and a bizarre lack of sensitivity. He’s famously written great parts for women with a clear moral sense of direction. And men who are a bit lost, who had a moral direction, but somehow they’ve lost it.”
Robert Moses very much falls into this category. Both men acknowledge their debt to Robert A. Caro’s monumental 1974 biography. But Hare’s own research took him in different directions. “Caro sees Moses as fundamentally about power,” he says. “He documents very brilliantly the accumulation of power, as if he loved it for its own sake. I think that might be a false charge. I think he had a vision of how New York should be, that started idealistically, with the idea of liberating the working classes. When public opinion changed radically, when the car is no longer a source of liberation but is beginning to be seen as a source of oppression, he can’t adapt his vision. That is so true of so many of us. I have spent my life among people who have had an idea and persist with that idea in the face of a changing reality. That seems to me a great tragic subject. It’s not about urban planning. It’s about all of us.”
In depicting that withering and hardening of Moses’s vision over the course of two acts, Fiennes achieves an extraordinary physical transformation. In front of your eyes, he seems to become older and more set in his ways. “I’m in my late 50s, and in the first half I have to suggest someone in their late 30s. I’m helped by an extra bit of hair here,” he says, smiling and rubbing his receding hairline. “Then, in the second half, I’m helped by a big, thick double-breasted suit, which gives a sense of weight.
“It was important, without recourse to grotesque makeup, to suggest the age difference in someone who got a little bit heavier but probably was still very active,” Fiennes goes on. “In all the pictures and old footage, you see someone who’s sort of fortified himself. There’s a great clip of him being interviewed, being challenged on why he thought it was that the communities were being destroyed by his roads. And he brings it back to the individuals, the individual has to yield to the majority. He basically says this is for the greater good. He has a sense of conviction about his own ideas.”
Fiennes has unconsciously adopted Moses’s voice—or at least the patrician Yale- and Oxford-educated tones that he uses to convey Moses’s attitudes, combined with a lift of the head that suggested he was looking down on those he claimed to represent. The most serious charge against this unelected public official is that he was a racist, one whose plans wiped out Black neighborhoods. It is an accusation that the play does not shirk.
“The Cross Bronx Expressway is probably his greatest crime,” says Hare. “I don’t think anyone can defend that road. A community was destroyed. It was after the road was built that James Baldwin—who seems a bigger and bigger figure as we move into the next century—said ‘Urban renewal means Negro removal.’ ”
Other issues in the play are also still loudly resonant today. Fiennes sees Moses’s obsession with the car, and his inability in the 1920s to foresee an overreliance on the road system, as echoing the development of the tech industry. “[In the 1920s] the car was exciting. Then suddenly the roads were congested, and his answer was to build more roads. It’s a bit like having our mobile phones, and then suddenly we are on the receiving end of so much crap. And what do we do? We just have more social media and more mobiles.”
Fiennes has been thinking about such things, not just because of his current isolation in rural Italy, but because one of his projects in the uncertain times of COVID lockdowns was to stage T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. “I think it’s a great poem about being human—written at a time of crisis,” he says, looking down thoughtfully. “It addresses in a complicated but brilliant way the great questions of time, faith, memory, and death, and I felt it had resonance, given where we were in a huge collective uncertainty.”
He worked on his stage version in Suffolk, where he was born and to which he has returned, putting down roots when he is not in London. But he has remained phenomenally busy, with film and theater projects, including starring in an adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel Conclave. He says he tries to be bold in decisions about his career. “When I was doing Four Quartets, I thought, Do I dare this? And then I thought, Well, don’t be cautious. Just see what happens.”
But as for everyone, COVID, which interrupted the Moroccan filming of Fiennes’s newest film, the haves-and-have-nots drama The Forgiven, had a decided impact on his thinking. “It encouraged me, pushed me to be grateful for every opportunity,” he says. “And if we’re talking about theater, it makes you value what it is to go to the theater.
“For myself, I love being onstage, I love being with a company. I have never lost the sense of the theater being the truest arena for an actor. That’s where you are exposed, but also connecting with an audience, feeling an audience being engaged. New York audiences may not like us coming with a play about their city, but I have a feeling that this play is witty, provocative, and funny enough for it to be an exciting evening.”
Hair, Kei Terada; Makeup, Ciona Johnson King. Costume Designer: Bob Crowley. Produced by 1972 Agency; Costume Management, Eleanor Dolan; Wig Design, Rob Wilson.