THE THEATRE HIGHWAY TO HELL

David Hare’s portrait of Robert Moses, “Straight Line Crazy.”

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

The biggest surprise of “Straight Line Crazy,” David Hare’s new play about the tsarist urban planner Robert Moses, is that it originated in London, where it received good reviews, earlier this year, at the Bridge Theatre. Moses is best known as the builder of a preponderance of New York City’s highways, and as the subject of Robert Caro’s masterly biography “The Power Broker.” In another life, I worked in city government; “The Power Broker” was a prerequisite for polite conversation among young technocrats. The book and its often maligned subject came up in passing chatter and in official speech, like Scripture quoted among preachers and Biblical scholars. But nobody in that scene, I can assure you, thought of Moses as a pop phenomenon worthy of international attention.

Why, then, were people in the U.K. so interested in the workings of New York state government? The play has landed at the Shed, in Hudson Yards, under the direction of Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage, much closer to its natural habitat. At the performance I attended, every time a New York City street or neighborhood was named, knowing laughter followed. Somebody near me whooped at the mere mention of Washington Square Park. I wouldn’t have thought that those lines would crack as well across the pond. The whole scenario attested, perhaps, to New York’s status as a truly global, endlessly fascinating city. Or it was evidence of the openminded erudition of London audiences. Or maybe it was—and still is, in New York—simply a matter of the star power of Ralph Fiennes, who plays Moses.