Gildart Jackson, Will Block and Adam Poole (Photo by Jason Niedle/TETHOS)
Reviewed by Philip Brandes
New Vic Theatre in Santa Barbara
Through Feb. 22
RECOMMENDED
Will Block, Adam Poole and Gildart Jackson
(Photo by Jason Niedle/TETHOS)
Three actors walk onto a boat. It sounds like the setup for a joke, and The Shark is Broken certainly delivers its share of punchlines — but its deeper bite comes with the psychological flotsam that surfaces between them.
Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon’s behind-the-scenes dramedy finds Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw adrift aboard the Orca during the infamously chaotic 1974 filming of Jaws. A continuously malfunctioning mechanical shark and other logistical delays leave them stranded for long stretches between takes, with nothing to do but drink, bicker, and inadvertently reveal long-sunken wounds dredged from the depths of their respective psyches.
In a stylish West Coast premiere from Santa Barbara’s Ensemble Theatre Company, Pesha Rudnick’s staging capably charts the combustible waypoints that propel the mounting friction between this trio of outsized personalities, including skillfully-scripted parallels between the real-life actors and their iconic roles that Jaws fans will further appreciate. Shaw (Gildart Jackson), the accomplished alpha thespian playing the movie’s obsessed shark hunter Quint, masks alcoholism and a dead father’s ghost behind Shakespeare recitations and withering put-downs of his co-stars. Dreyfuss (Will Block), the emerging young acting talent playing know-it-all oceanographer Hooper, seesaws between fame-hungry ambition and self-doubting panic attacks. Scheider (Adam Poole), cast as the pragmatically heroic landlubber sheriff, becomes the on-set peacemaker quietly holding things together despite his own repressed anxieties.
Amid the production’s overall solid clarity, Gildart Jackson’s Shaw stands out with nuanced depth and credibility. The play’s most insightful focus on this character isn’t all that surprising — co-author Ian Shaw is Robert Shaw’s son and played him in the original London and Broadway productions, so there’s an inherently more personal coming-to-terms with his late father’s legacy at work.
That scripted leg up notwithstanding, Jackson’s incarnation of Shaw’s Jaws persona is a wonder to behold. With an authenticity assist from costume designer Adriana Lámbarri, Jackson nails the look, domineering physicality, accent, and, abrasive mannerisms of Quint, the latter-day Ahab in Jaws who makes his onscreen introduction scraping his fingernails on a blackboard. Yet Jackson’s performance also presents something more layered, showing us Robert Shaw as a man whose own demons and obsessions mirror his film character in ways that blur the line between performer and role. Already a celebrated stage and film actor, the conflicted Shaw despises the Hollywood commercialism of this foundering shark movie project, yet desperately needs the money to support nine children and escape high British taxes. His own white whale —alcoholism — is evident throughout as he hunts down the bottles of booze he’s squirreled away in various hiding places aboard the Orca. Now 47, he’s desperate to outlive the death of his father by suicide at age fifty-two — and his drinking intensifies in part to cope with this looming deadline.
Jackson’s performance illuminates how these complex factors drive Shaw’s notorious bullying and feuding with Dreyfuss, the insecure nebbish who’s desperate for a way forward in his stalled acting career but fears Jaws will be a disastrous mistake. Unfortunately, Will Block’s amped-up performance lacks complementary shading to Shaw’s rich layering — from the get-go he’s like an SNL parody of Dreyfuss’ neurotic mannerisms in full bloom (a la The Goodbye Girl or Close Encounters of the Third Kind), leaving little range in reserve here for emotional arcs.
As apparent third wheel Roy Scheider, Adam Poole faces different challenges with greater success. More of a solid character actor than a movie star, Scheider boards the Orca without pre-defined celebrity baggage, making him less susceptible to caricature than his co-stars. Poole’s performance is subtler but no less important — his calm, steadying presence and quiet compassion repeatedly defuse conflicts between Shaw and Dreyfuss. He also gracefully handles the character’s emerging revelations about Scheider’s abusive father and his boxing background, while voicing the play’s most measured views on art, entertainment, and the film’s meaning.
That these character revelations emerge as impactfully as they do owes much to the physical environment that traps them together. The set by Fred Kinney is a scaled replica of the movie’s Orca shown in cutaway side view, with equal visibility into the interior cabin and exterior deck. Projection design by Elijah Frankle evokes an ocean backdrop with some well-executed movement, though more continuous gentle rolling would temper the artifice of a stationary horizon line.
The overall cramped, unglamorous visual practicality is central to both the film’s claustrophobic tension and the play’s premise: three actors with clashing egos and temperaments stuck together on a small fishing boat with nowhere to escape each other. They think they’re killing time on a disposable monster movie. The audience knows they’re making cinema history — and that Shaw won’t live to see fifty-two. That dramatic irony is the play’s secret weapon. Every dismissive crack about the film’s prospects, every anxious joke about fame and mortality, lands differently because we know what’s coming.
The Shark is Broken is far from a literary masterpiece, but it shrewdly uses the framing pressure-cooker movie production story to explore meaningful themes of fathers and sons, art versus commerce, and the fragility of the male ego — all made possible because a damn mechanical shark refuses to work.
New Vic Theatre, 33 West Victoria St., Santa Barbara. Wed.-Thurs, 7:30 pm, Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 2 pm; thru Feb. 22. www.etcsb.org. Running time: one hour and 50 minutes with no intermission.
