‘The Shark Is Broken’ Review: In the ‘Jaws’ of a Blockbuster

Shorn of context, “The Shark Is Broken” is a head-scratcher of a title that must rank among the oddest to glow from a Broadway marquee. But audiences attending the play are unlikely to pay for tickets without knowing what they are in for. The predator of the title is the most famous shark in history, the fictional creature nicknamed Bruce, who chomped on several unfortunate swimmers in the 1975 blockbuster “Jaws.”

The play, written by Ian Shaw —who also portrays his father, the actor Robert Shaw —and Joseph Nixon, depicts the sometimes fractious, sometimes friendly and often funny interactions of the film’s stars, Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss ( Alex Brightman ) and Roy Scheider ( Colin Donnell ), during the copious amounts of downtime they had to kill, often because the biggest star on the set, that recalcitrant Bruce, was malfunctioning.

“The Shark Is Broken” is not a play for the ages, or even for those who have never seen “Jaws,” but it’s a frisky and continuously amusing diversion—perfect late-summer entertainment if you want to stay away from the ocean. (In a bit of ghoulish timeliness, there have been an unusual number of shark sightings on Long Island this summer, including an attack on New York City’s Rockaway Beach this week.)

Slender though it may be, at a crisp 95 minutes it holds one’s attention in no small part because the actors playing their more famous counterparts are so superb, giving performances that perfectly capture the personas, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of Shaw, Dreyfuss and Scheider, at least as documented in various books and movies about the making of “Jaws.” Yet none of the actors is indulging in mere comic mimicry. All give fully rounded, nuanced performances that give the play a layer of verisimilitude in its more serious moments, as the movie actors—each at a different stage in his career—turn to self-examination and reveal their doubts and demons.

The setting is the cabin of the vessel owned by Quint, the shark-hunter played by Shaw. It has been designed by Duncan Henderson with impressive attention to replicating the look of the boat in the movie, such as the worn-looking red leather cushions on which the men often slump, bemoaning their unhappy fates as the shooting of the movie drags well past its planned end date.

The primary source of tension in the cabin is the smoldering antipathy between Shaw and Dreyfuss, whose sharply different but similarly outsize personalities keep them at loggerheads. Shaw, with his craggy crankiness and simmering disgust for what he sees as a forgettable piece of populist entertainment, drowns his unhappiness and self-contempt in booze, having stashed several bottles around the cabin.

Mr. Shaw, with his piercing blue eyes and his father’s memorable facial hair from the movie—furry mustache and mutton chop sideburns—soon makes us forget how eerily he channels his dad’s (occasionally incomprehensible) voice. Without sentimentalizing him, but with a dedication that is oddly moving, Mr. Shaw digs inside the character to reveal the reasons for his generally cantankerous mood, which is to say his disappointment in a career that began during the postwar prime of British theater—he worked with Harold Pinter and Peter O’Toole —but has sputtered since.

As Dreyfuss, Mr. Brightman, the star of the musicals “School of Rock” and “Beetlejuice,” hilariously channels the neuroses of a Jewish boy from Queens (“Nothing good ever happened to any Jew on the water”) combined with the ample neuroses of an actor. His anxiety upon learning that his breakthrough role, in “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, ” may not turn out to be the ticket to stardom he expected (oh, the irony), is affecting, and Mr. Brightman makes a tasty meal of Dreyfuss’s big breakdown scene, when he finds himself crawling under the cabin’s table in a state of acute emotional regression.

Mr. Donnell has the least flashy role, presumably because Scheider was of a more even-keeled temperament than his co-stars. He mostly plays referee, as did Scheider’s character, the police chief Brody, soothing the antagonism between Shaw and Dreyfuss when the frustrated—and in Shaw’s case, often soused—actors begin flaying one another. He does have his share of pungent lines: When Shaw mentions his nine kids, Scheider quips, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” And perhaps as a sort of consolation prize for having the less juicy part, the play pauses to give Mr. Donnell a chance to strip down to a Speedo, thus revealing a chiseled body.

“The Shark Is Broken,” which has been directed with an expert sense of timing and balance by Guy Masterson,

It’s not a play of particularly sharp bite, if you will, but it’s both a lively comedy and a surprisingly sensitive exploration of the ever-uneasy psyches of ambitious actors, battling prickly insecurities while husbanding healthier than normal egos, and surfing the tides of impossible-to-foresee vagaries in a famously vagary-filled profession.

—Mr. Isherwood is the Journal’s theater critic.