By Daniel Buckwalter
Let’s start with a show of hands: How many of us have had a weeks-long work project with a group of co-workers that started well enough, then got bogged down by endless delays, mechanical failures, cost overruns and had that one incurably annoying character in the crew who, by the end of the project, you wanted to punch in the face?
Sounds harsh? Well, it’s the thread that runs throughout the play titled The Shark is Broken — part comedy, part masterclass on how not to handle stress, part sad foretelling about the movie business — which completed its first weekend on Aug. 30 in the Very Little Theatre’s smaller space, Stage Left. The play has seven more performances, concluding Sept. 13.
It’s a play about the chaotic filming off Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts of the 1974 movie Jaws. Directed by a 26-year-old Steven Spielberg, the film itself thrilled millions after its release, grossing more than $400 million in its initial run — a true blockbuster — though the better story may well have been about the making of the film.
It was one disaster after another, all centering around the mechanical shark (dubbed Bruce) which couldn’t handle corrosive salt water. Spielberg is forced to rewrite much of the script, and the down time is interminable for three actors in the movie, all of them familiar names in the industry and the only three characters in the play: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw, played at VLT by actors Damon Noyes, Christiana Dancer, and Kelly Oristano..
Directed at VLT by Scott Machado, The Shark is Broken was written by Ian Shaw (Robert Shaw’s son) and Joseph Nixon. The younger Shaw, no doubt, heard all the tales about the filming of Jaws, and years after the father’s death, he and Nixon set out to give a unique perspective of the production – including all the backstories and animosities.
Robert Shaw died in 1978. He was only 51, and he had his demons, manifested in alcohol straight from the bottles. Oristano does a good job portraying a dour and pretentious high-brow Englishman with ample stage and film credits who can’t escape his past and sees only doom for his beloved profession (including, I think, coming to hate sequels).
Noyes also gives a solid performance playing the role of Roy Scheider, a character with his own sad past but who can compartmentalize it well enough to be functional. Indeed, the Scheider character is well-read on current events and tidbits of history, and I think he would have won trivia contests at Bier Stein.
My favorite performance was Dancer’s portrayal of Richard Dreyfuss, whose acting career was just starting to gain traction at this point. Dancer, complete with beard and soft pudgy belly, does very well capturing Dreyfuss’ insufferable neurotic tics, the kind that makes the Robert Shaw character full of contempt — he calls Dreyfuss “boy” throughout — and, in one instance, full-on rage.
Fortunately, most work projects that last for weeks don’t have this much angst, but the movie Jaws did, and it’s part of the film’s lore.
So, too, is the play The Shark is Broken, written with love and candor, and very much worth seeing in VLT’s Stage Left.
The Shark is Broken continues with 7:30 p.m. performances on Sept. 3, 4, 5, 11 and 12 and 2 p.m. performances on Sept. 6 and 13 at VLT at 2350 Hilyard St. Ticket information is available at thevlt.com.
