Ralph Fiennes to Star in Play About Robert Moses at the Shed

“Straight Line Crazy,” the play by David Hare about the contentious urban planner Robert Moses, directed by Nicholas Hytner and Jamie Armitage, is coming to New York this fall.

Following a buzzy spring run at the Bridge Theater in London, the play about Moses’s legacy of power and divisive creations of highways, parks and bridges will premiere at the Shed’s Griffin Theater for a nine-week run with preview performances starting Oct. 18 and an opening night slated for Oct. 26.

“Straight Line Crazy” follows Moses’s rise to influence in the late 1920s as one of New York’s most powerful men, and then his devolution in the late 1950s, when grass-roots organizers and public transportation advocates decried his public works for displacing residents and disenfranchising communities who stood (or lived) in the way of his vision.

“I think what this play evokes for us, and evokes here in New York, is who gets to shape our city spaces, who gets to shape our public spaces? What voices are engaged in these processes that affect so many?” Madani Younis, chief executive producer at the Shed, said in an interview.

Moses will be played by the Tony Award-winning and Oscar-nominated actor Ralph Fiennes (also known for playing Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies), returning to New York theater for the first time since 2006, when he starred as the gaunt miracle worker (and possible charlatan) in Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer.”

The theater critic Matt Wolf wrote in The New York Times that in the London run of “Straight Line Crazy,” Fiennes had “enough barrel-chested authority to sustain interest in what might otherwise seem arcane,” adding that he almost wished the play were longer.

Younis, of the Shed, said, “This is the rise and fall story of a very divisive figure and it stirs up questions for our present about civic responsibility, about values and who shapes cities.”

“This is what great art should always do,” he said.

The production will run through Dec. 18.