From left, Jakie Cabe as Roy Scheider, Brandon J. Murphy as Robert Shaw and Brandon Wilhelm as Richard Dreyfuss in Amphibian Stage’s production of The Shark is Broken.
Evan Michael Woods
Jaws launched the blockbuster era of moviemaking in 1975. It was the first film to gross more than $100 million and led to the franchise model reliant on heavy marketing and merchandising for financial success that Star Wars solidified a couple of years later. That model still dominates the movie business to this day.
It almost wasn’t to be.
The Shark is Broken, a snappy if mostly easygoing comedy co-written by a son of one of the stars, re-creates the many weeks that actors Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss spent aboard the Orca, the boat they were stuck on as technicians repeatedly tried to get any one of the three mechanical sharks to work.
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Only 27 at the time, director Steven Spielberg almost got fired as the shoot on location in Martha’s Vineyard stretched from a planned 50-some days to more than 150, exceeding its budget by millions.
Those issues provide the background for Amphibian Stage’s entertaining production focusing on the intermittently tense relationship between the marooned stars, particularly the erudite, heavy drinking Shaw and the foul-mouthed and insecure Dreyfuss (who has objected to the way he’s portrayed in the play, written by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon).
At a matinee last Sunday, the laughs came frequently over 100 intermission-less minutes as the men bicker, bond and almost come to blows. Brandon J. Murphy as Shaw and Brandon Wilhelm as Dreyfuss give the larger performances while remaining grounded, believable characters. Scheider, as played by Jakie Cabe, is the most mysterious of the trio, Cabe giving a laid-back, naturalistic reading of the part.
It turns out all three men had rough childhoods marked by absent or abusive fathers. The fun comes from the clash of their personalities — Shaw regularly teasing and challenging Dreyfuss — and the foreshadowing of future events, like a passing reference to Spielberg’s plan to make a film about aliens, which Shaw finds ridiculous.
Already established with Shakespeare and Pinter under his belt, Shaw is dismissive of the ways of the younger Dreyfuss, who’s depicted as a wannabe but already with the ego of a star. Scheider often serves as referee, spending a lot of his time reading the daily paper.
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When positive reviews come in for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Dreyfuss beams. “This is it,” he says. “I’m big. I’m officially big.”
Amphibian’s simple set is ingenious. The inside of the boat faces the audience, with the water in the back. The nicest touch is a film backdrop of the sea that shifts its look depending on the time of day, weather and mood.
Under the direction of David A. Miller, The Shark is Broken moves through the strife and stultifying delays to a kind of reconciliation. Not one filming of a scene is shown, and the shark — nicknamed Bruce — is never seen.
Instead, the characters discuss their careers, who did and didn’t read the Jaws book, who else they heard was considered for their roles, whether Shaw is a socialist and if it was a mistake to shoot on location instead of on one of Universal’s many soundstages with water tanks.
Also which of their characters is most important to the film. Dreyfuss offers that there’s no movie without his scientist. Shaw gets poetic in his snooty British accent. “It’s the grit of the oyster that produces the pearl,” he says. “I am that grit.”
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Scheider opines that maybe this is a new kind of movie. If only he knew.
Details
Through Aug. 16 at 120 S. Main St., Fort Worth. $30-$60. amphibianstage.com.