Dept. of Arias: Moses Figures

Reeves Wiedeman

WILL RAWLS WAS waiting in the Lorimer Street subway station one recent Sunday, trying to get to a rehearsal in Chelsea—Rawls is the choreographer for a new opera about Robert Moses, the dictatorial city planner, and Jane Jacobs, the populist city un-planner—when he had a thought. The L train wasn’t coming, and pretty soon, with repairs threatening to suspend service between Brooklyn and Manhattan for more than a year, the train wouldn’t be coming at all. “I was, like, this shit is always broken,” Rawls said, after arriving in Chelsea. “I almost want Robert Moses 2.0 to come back and fix the M.T.A.” “That’s a very human emotion, to want a Moses-like figure to come in and fix everything,” Joshua Frankel, the opera’s director, said. “What did Moses do about public transit,…

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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 22, 2016

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