The Shark Is Broken
Broadway review by Adam Feldman Ian Shaw was four years old in 1974, when his father, the British actor and alcoholic Robert Shaw, filmed his role as the weather-beaten hunter Quint in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. The elder Shaw died four years later; now, the junior is portraying him in the diverting The Shark Is Broken, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Jaws on location at Martha’s Vineyard. The play, co-written with Joseph Nixon, strands Shaw at sea with his fellow lead actors—Richard Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman) and Roy Scheider (Colin Donnell)—then invites us to spy on their booze-soaked clashes, bonding and petty mutinies as they wait to be called to action. Played well by his son, who bears a striking resemblance to him, this Shaw is as tempestuous as Quint. On one hand, he is a classical thespian who threads Shakespeare into his dialogue—Hamlet, Lear, Sonnet 29 in full—and flaunts his contempt for the movie they are making: “It’s bread and circuses, chums.” But on the flip side of that same hand, he’s a dipsomaniacal terror who hides flasks of liquor all over the set and mercilessly goads the softer, thinner-skinned Dreyfuss. (If that’s his chum, is Shaw the shark?) The even-keeled Scheider, meanwhile, is caught between his co-stars’ different strains of vanity—not that he’s wholly immune to that particular sin. (When he has a moment to himself, he strips down to tan with a foil reflector.) The Shark Is Broken | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy If not for our on