Actor Richard Dreyfuss (Dylan James Pereira, front) gestures while the other main performers in the film Jaws, Roy Scheider (Nathan Luft-Runner, left) and Robert Shaw (Matt Cadigan), look on in a dramedy at the Left Edge Theatre, The Shark Is Broken. (Photo by Dana Hunt)
By WOODY WEINGARTEN
The Shark Is Broken may be billed as a comedy but might better be viewed as a drama peppered with laughs.
The 95-minute play details the real-life, repugnant interactions of actors Richard Dreyfuss (Dylan James Pereira), Robert Shaw (Matt Cadigan), and Roy Scheider (Nathan Luft-Runner) off and on the set of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 cinematic blockbuster, Jaws.
Tensions spring from shooting delays caused by pre-CGI and AI mechanical devices — intended to power the threatening shark — conking out. Add to that a feud between a young Dreyfuss and an aging Shaw (known as much for his Shakespearean roles and his writing as for his Hollywood work) that sets a troublesome tone throughout.
Scheider, a more stoic, professorial type, can’t elude Shaw’s negativity either. When he bemoans the two-month ocean shoot in Martha’s Vineyard as “a long time to be stuck together,” Shaw one-ups him: “It’s an eternity.”
Many scenes in the Dana Hunt-directed play replicate precisely what happened. At least that’s what Ian Shaw, the actor’s son, would have us believe. It was he who co-wrote the play with Joseph Nixon (never shrinking from repeatedly depicting his dad as a stumbling drunk).
The Shaw character, who alludes to his own father killing himself when the actor was 12, is fully cognizant of his shortcomings and how they affect others. He refers to priding himself for being able to act at all after “a tidal wave of booze” and notes that he can find himself “with a drink in my hand as a reward for not drinking.”
Trying to cozy up to the British actor, and hopefully eliminating an avalanche of putdowns, Dreyfuss brings his elder joy by looking for and finding two hidden bottles of booze. But he also dumps the contents of yet another bottle, an action that transforms a war of words into more physical combat.
Much of the play’s humor is pitch black, with sarcasm being the main coin of the theatrical realm. Early on, the panic attack-prone Dreyfuss fears for his career because the film they’re in could end up being like Planet of the Apes“without the monkeys.”
In brazen contrast while alone in the show’s funniest moments later, he presents a mocking imitation of Shaw.
Starring in The Shark Is Broken are (from left) Dylan James Pereira, Nathan Luft-Runner, and Matt Cadigan. (Photo by Dana Hunt)
Together, the three characters touch on a gamut of subjects: father-son relationships, philosophical and scientific journeys of the mind and mouth, and pointed references to Nixon (“tricky Dickie”), the Silent Majority, and Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Harold Pinter,
To pass the time, they gamble on cards and a British coin-flip game — and almost constantly refer to their previous hits, as well as films that crashed and burned, and other actors.
They also debate their billing and who is the film’s star, their egos never letting them think for an instant that it’s the animatronic shark.
Just before their final scene, in both reel and real life, Shaw indicate he doesn’t think much of Jaws and goes on to trash Spielberg’s next unnamed project that will become E.T. — the Extra-Terrestrial with one pejorative word, aliens, and then predicts that the film industry in the future will be limited to churning out “sequels and rewrites and sequels.”
Snarkily, he also says, “Do you really think anybody is going to be talking about this in 50 years?”
The Shark Is Broken will play at the Left Edge Theatre of the California Theatre, 528 7th St., Santa Rosa, through April 11. Tickets: $22 to $33. Info: 707-664-play or https://leftedgetheatre.com.
Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com.
