Ralph Fiennes in The Return.
Photo: Bleecker Street
Anyone who saw Ralph Fiennes onstage in Straight Line Crazy, David Hare’s 2022 play about the career of Robert Moses, came away with the realization (or at least the reminder) that this man is one of our most physical actors. As the controversial New York bureaucrat and city planner, Fiennes strode and charged across a stage dominated by a map of the city, his body a metaphor for Moses’s ability to plow through forests and hills and villages and neighborhoods. The performance was so explosive, the actor so driven, that you wondered if at some point he might bound off the Shed’s modest proscenium and into your lap. That sounds like a joke, but it felt real at the time —…
