Robert Moses reimagined: Off-Broadway play ‘Straight Line Crazy’ takes on legacy of NYC’s controversial master builder

Robert Moses, who dreamed up parkways that transformed Long Island and carved six reviled neighborhood-razing lanes of pavement through the South Bronx, arrives in a new play as a sort of misanthropic Robin Hood builder.

His chest puffed and his shoes sandy from the New York shore, this Moses spends an opening scene trying to convince a haughty Henry Vanderbilt to accept his plans to build freeways across Long Island in service of poor and middle-class city dwellers seeking weekend escape.

Vanderbilt (Guy Paul) rejects his plans with a side of NIMBY bile, leaving Moses to utter a version of a quote from his ally Gov. Al Smith: “Between the few and the many, I cast my lot with the many.”

In “Straight Line Crazy,” by David Hare, Moses sometimes tiptoes toward anti-hero status — lawbreaking, rude, bullying, quietly racist, vocally sexist — but gripped by a democratic vision for his grand building plans.

His is a rigid dream impermeable to pushback or changing times, tainted irrevocably by bias.

Moses is played by Ralph Fiennes; the British film star gives a significant dose of daring to the character and his presence helped inflate sky-high ticket prices at the Shed, the Off-Broadway venue where the play is running until Dec. 18.

The real-life Moses died in 1981, after redrawing New York’s map as an unelected bureaucrat.

Today, New Yorkers benefit and suffer from his designs: the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, the United Nations building; the list goes on.

His victories, which included some 660 playgrounds and more than 400 miles of parkway, were perhaps eclipsed by his crimes against urban New York, none more noxious than the Cross Bronx Expressway, which still pours auto pollution into South Bronx neighborhoods.

The 1974 publication of Robert Caro’s sprawling biography of Moses, “The Power Broker,” battered the builder’s reputation, excavating the racism that animated his work.

Powerful yet unelected, Moses built roads, but not rapid transit. He cleared neighborhoods where Black and brown New Yorkers lived. His public housing developments helped cement New York’s segregation.

Caro’s 1,246-page book, devastating in its detail, ends by reflecting a prevailing view of Moses fans: “Couldn’t people see what he had done? Why weren’t they grateful?” The implicit answer is obvious.

Recent scholarship, though, has sought to reassess Moses’ imprint, and some of Caro’s findings have been disputed by researchers.

Hare, who is British and brought his play to London before Manhattan, described Caro as the “complete pioneer” and a prodigious researcher.

But the playwright, who studied books, documentaries and news clippings to write “Straight Line Crazy,” said he wanted to go in another direction from “The Power Broker.”

“I didn’t necessarily think his interpretation of who Moses was was definitive,” Hare told The News. “And I had a different idea about it.”

The play is running in the 500-seat Griffin Theater at the Shed, which is nestled in Hudson Yards, itself a Mosesian neighborhood in the southwestern reaches of Midtown.

The pre-planned Hudson Yards has been panned by critics as soulless and has sparked debate among New Yorkers. The play could create its own debates.

A fictionalized Jane Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger), who pops up occasionally as the play’s narrator and conscience, says her success preventing Moses from building a freeway through Washington Square Park did not preserve Greenwich Village.

“What was once a community was cleansed of everyone but the rich,” Jacobs says. “The Village was saved, but it was also destroyed. Whether that was Robert Moses’ fault or whether it was mine, I really can’t say.”

The play often operates somewhere around there, in undefined shades of gray. Did Moses cast his lot closer to the few or the many?

“I want to send people out arguing,” Hare said.