The Shark is Broken at Mirvish Productions

Photo by Helen Maybanks

Less than a month ago, Steven Spielberg’s new film The Fabelmans premiered at the Princess of Wales. The semi-autobiographical film traces a young boy named Sammy’s first steps towards becoming a filmmaker. Near its end, Sammy scores a meeting with a legendary Hollywood director. The director only has one piece of advice, and it’s about where in a shot the horizon should be.

Now there’s another Spielberg related work in a Mirvish theatre: the North American premiere of The Shark is Broken, a lax backstage drama about Jaws’ three male leads killing time while the film’s real star — the mechanical shark Bruce — is being repaired. The whole play takes place on a boat surrounded by projections of water; the horizon is always in sight.

The three Jaws actors — Roy Scheider (Demetri Goritsas), Richard Dreyfuss (Liam Murray Scott), and Robert Shaw (co-writer Ian Shaw) — feel like a group of men from a Howard Hawks movie. They take great pride in their work, and see themselves as hardworking professionals: why else would they still be on this boat?

The brash young Richard is the most open of the three. Right leg constantly shaking, he bores Robert and Roy by oversharing his dreams of doing “serious theatre”. He’s also the most vocally frustrated about the Bruce situation.

Robert, though, is hardened. A veteran actor, he’s been on many a dysfunctional set and drinks to cope with the stress. Once drunk, he takes pride in dominating the room — and he especially likes to tease Richard.

Roy is more difficult to pin down. Thoughtful and centered, he’s the straight man of the group. The diplomat.

The play soars when nothing is happening, which is most of the time. Like Hawks’s hangout movies (Rio Bravo chief among them), the men spend their time drinking, bantering, and fighting. They try to hide in their masculine shells, but sensitivity slowly surfaces. And after so much talking, when they play a game consisting of flicking a coin across a table, it is surprisingly compelling.

These hangout scenes gracefully raise questions about the performance of masculinity. Eventually, these questions are perhaps too plainly said out loud — “does being an actor undermine your masculinity, Robert?” — but it’s never too overbearing.

The show plays without an intermission — a fantastic choice, because after ninety minutes of looking at the same people on the same set, time begins to warp. The transitions fast forward time, furthering confusing things; in the end, it’s impossible to tell how long the men have been on the boat. Fitting — I’m sure it was a blur for them too.

The actors inhabit the space expertly. They’ve evidently been doing the play for a long time, and everything is incredibly locked in. Scott is the clear standout: his theatrical exaggerations of Richard’s nervousness are just the right size.

Some elements of the design confused me. The script, along with Duncan Henderson’s detailed boat set, establishes the the ocean locale quite clearly. So I’m not sure much is gained by projecting an animated backdrop of waves and playing seagull sounds for the whole runtime. We’re not going to forget where we are.

But I feel certain that Jaws fans will find what they’re looking for in this backstager. And while I embarrassingly haven’t seen the film, the play still made perfect sense to me: it’s more about the not filming of Jaws than the filming of Jaws, so not much prior knowledge is needed. Just a willingness to spend a few weeks in a dimly lit boat with some ego fragile actors. What’s not to like?