Straight Line Crazy
Additional Resources

Welcome to The Shed and the exclusive US engagement of David Hare’s new play Straight Line Crazy, which offers a powerful portrait of Robert Moses and his controversial legacy, compellingly brought to life by Ralph Fiennes and artfully directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage. It has been an honor to partner with London Theatre Company in bringing the play to our city, where Moses’s legacy is still an integral part of the fabric of New York.

From the 1920s until the 1960s, Robert Moses was considered among the most powerful men in New York as he designed and executed numerous public works projects, from landmarks like the United Nations headquarters and city roadways like the Westside Highway to public pools, beaches, and new bridges, tunnels, and expressways connecting city and suburb. However, he accomplished many of his projects (without ever being elected to public office) at the expense of disempowered New Yorkers, particularly people of color, living in the way of his plans.

As a nonprofit cultural center located on city-owned land, we at The Shed were drawn to this play for its relevance to the cross-generational impact of urban planning and the newly built neighborhood we inhabit. One strength of this play lies in how its backward glance can spur a wider range of discussions and actions about the significance of community, neighborhoods, public space, and how we take care of each other and the city we share.

My sincere thanks go to our wonderful cast, creative team, and crew; to all my Shed colleagues; and to you, our audience, for joining us and taking part in the communion of theater.

Straight Line Crazy tells a story of power struggles that shaped New York City in the mid-20th century. Though it first premiered in London, this production, written by one of our great playwrights, David Hare, will surely connect with New York audiences in new ways. A truly remarkable team has brought this play to life. Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage bring their expertise as directors, and the brilliant Ralph Fiennes, in the starring role of Robert Moses, returns to the New York stage for the first time since 2006. I’m honored to welcome each of them, along with David and the entire cast and creative team, to The Shed.

Straight Line Crazy looks back at two imagined moments in the life of an alternately lionized and criticized historical figure to open fresh questions about how we occupy and share public space today. The play captured the imaginations of Londoners because, though its action is set on Long Island and in New York City, its themes are global. It is a story of powerful tensions between communities and one person’s ambition.

Moses exemplifies a type of unchecked power that can often be reduced to stories we tell ourselves about the past, but this play doesn’t let us off the hook in asking how power is exercised today. While dramatizing the consequences of unelected decision makers shaping our city in the past, it kindles our desire for the accountability and engagement we seek from today’s public officials. Over the last three years, in New York as well as around the world, we’ve experienced what happens when crises strain already scarce resources that support the public good, from stresses on the health care system to housing and food security. To contextualize what you will see on stage, we’ve organized several public programs about Moses’s legacy and city planning in our own time (please visit theshed.org/SLC for more details).

At the end of Straight Line Crazy, we’re left to examine how power moves in our cities today, intersecting with historically vulnerable communities. How can we demand equity and accountability in public planning? In whose image are we shaping our cities?

Will there ever be a settled opinion about Robert Moses, the man who gave us, among other things, Jones Beach, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, Lincoln Center, the Westside Highway, Shea Stadium, the UN Headquarters, and probably—calculations differ—627 miles of landscaped expressway? Moses’s influence, as the chief advocate of what he called “a motorized civilization,” has reached far beyond the single state in which he did his work.

In 1974, Robert Caro published his famous biography The Power Broker, and since then city theorists of all stripes, amateur and professional, have piled in to make the picture even richer, and to broaden the debates. Moses never responded to the book itself, only to Caro’s four-part profile, excerpted in the New Yorker. Moses attacked Caro’s account as “full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty baseless personalities, and random haymakers.” In answer to the accusation that he had ripped through living communities of minorities and the poor, Moses replied, “I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people, as I hail the chef who can make omelettes without breaking eggs.”

As a Jew who didn’t admit he was a Jew and a planner who hated planners, Moses seemed an irresistible theatrical subject when the director Nick Hytner suggested him. After all, Ralph Fiennes and I had already collaborated on Ibsen’s portrait of an intractable architect in The Master Builder. But, for the themes to be given light and shade, it seemed a good idea also to portray one of his most celebrated critics, the downtown campaigner Jane Jacobs, in spite of the inconvenient fact that the two sworn enemies never actually met. Since one of Moses’s rare defeats came at the hands of my old friend, the great producer Joe Papp—Joe wanted a theater in Central Park; Moses didn’t—I would love to dedicate this run of New York performances at The Shed to Joe’s memory.

Urbanism

What is Urban Design? from the NYC Department of City Planning

Talks featuring urban planners around the world, across myriad topics

Advocacy Work

Regeneration through Culture: Building Spaces for Communities from Tedx Talks

A conversation with Dr. Destiny Thomas on dignity-infused community engagement as a frame-work for planning and development

NYC History

Robert Moses: Did He Save New York City—or Destroy It?

Robert Moses: The Man Who Built the Modern New York

An introduction to the history of Manhattan’s grid plan

Legacies of Displacement

Seneca Village: the lost neighborhood under New York’s Central Park

The Tragedy of Urban Renewal: The destruction and survival of a New York City neighborhood

Urban Design Froum convenes civic leaders to confront the defining issues in New York City’s built environment.

BlackSpace explores ways to center Black life in the built environment.

Center for Urban Pedagogy collaborates with people impacted by public policies and systems of power to create easy-to-understand, visual materials that help communities access services, claim their rights, and fight for change.

Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development builds community power to win affordable housing and thriving, equitable neighborhoods for all New Yorkers.

Where We Live NYC is an initiative of the City of New York, and it includes close coordination with a robust team of government and community-based partners.

Thrivance Group works, in the interest of racialized people, to bring transformative justice into public policy, urban planning and community development.

Robert Moses in the New York Preservation Archive Project

Robert Moses and the NYC Parks System at NYC Parks.org

How do land use changes happen in NYC?
Land Use and ReZoning from the NYC Department of City Planning

Learn about the people’s money.
The Civic Participatory Budgeting Process from NYC.gov

“Turn Every Page”: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Archive

• An ongoing exhibition exploring historian Robert A. Caro’s research and methodology as a reporter, biographer, and writer. Among the items on view are Caro’s files and papers on Robert Moses while writing The Power Broker.

Christopher Alexander, et al., A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) (Oxford University Press, 1977).

Teju Cole, Open City (New York: Random House, 2011).

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House and Vintage Books, 1961).

Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (BRAGELONNE, 2022).

Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution (Reprint) (New York: Penguin Books, 2017).

Jeff Speck, Walkable City (Tenth Anniversary Edition): How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (New York: Picador, 2022).