British actor Robert Shaw received top billing in Jaws, but the biggest divo on the set was the shark.
Nicknamed “Bruce” after director Steven Spielberg’s lawyer, the mechanical Carcharodon carcharias malfunctioned for most of the film’s production, which took place for 159 days in 1974 along the east coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
“The shark is not working” became a constant refrain during the film’s long shoot, leaving the three principal actors — Roy Scheider as a local police chief, Richard Dreyfuss as an ichthyologist, and Shaw as the grizzled shark hunter, Quint — marooned together for weeks at a time on board the Orca, a 42-foot former lobster boat.
The Shark Is Broken, a one-act play by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, aptly timed for the film’s 50th anniversary this year, and running through October 5 at Maryland Ensemble Theatre (MET), is a behind-the-scenes dramedy that imagines the chats, spats, feuds, and fisticuffs that occurred during all that downtime.
Each Jaws actor has his own coping strategy befitting his nature. Roy Scheider (Steven Todd Smith) strips down to his Speedo to sunbathe, Richard Dreyfuss (MET Ensemble member Willem Rogers, nailing Dreyfuss’s hand gestures and boyish giggle) neurotically frets about his career, and Robert Shaw (Capitol Steps alum Kevin Corbett), an alcoholic who died at age 51, drinks like a fish and taunts Dreyfuss.
With a nod to Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, director Gené Fouché wisely confines the action to the ship, a thoroughly detailed replica of the Orca courtesy of set designer David DiFalco, creating a sense of claustrophobia that’s only heightened by the MET’s intimate venue.
But the dramatic stakes are low (we know that Jaws became a blockbuster), and the ironic, meta-humor is lazy, such as when Shaw, predicting Spielberg’s future directorial moves, asks, “What next, dinosaurs?” Or when he declares that no future president could be more immoral than Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon.
The Shark Is Broken is billed as a three-hander, but Steven Todd Smith has little to do here besides showing off his lithe, Scheider-esque physique and breaking up fights between Dreyfuss and Shaw.
Willem Rogers is gifted the play’s funniest lines as Dreyfuss (often at his character’s expense), but even those feel like warmed-over Woody Allen routines: “Jews should stay away from water. Nothing good ever happened to any Jews on the water.”
The play’s co-writer Ian Shaw, the son of Robert Shaw, used his father’s drinking diary as source material, and he is unsparing here in his depiction of his father’s struggles with alcohol. When Rogers’s Richard Dreyfuss throws a bottle of Shaw’s bourbon overboard (true story), you believe that Shaw the elder is capable of murder.
As written by Shaw the younger, Shaw is also surprisingly generous. In an invented scene, Corbett’s Shaw rescues Dreyfuss from a panic attack with a spontaneous rendition of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state”), perhaps to remind us that Robert Shaw toured with the Old Vic and was directed by Gielgud.
And yet the real drama in this play exists off stage, in the father-son dynamic between Ian Shaw and his father, who died in 1978 when Ian Shaw was only 8, and in whose career footsteps he followed.
Ian Shaw not only co-wrote The Shark Is Broken but also played his father in previous productions from the West End to Broadway. It’s only by reading The Shark Is Broken as an Oedipal struggle between the two Shaws that the play makes a claim on our emotions. Ian Shaw may have spent his life avoiding associations with his more famous father, but this play is rather transparently his attempt to measure up to his father’s formidable talent. To quote the tagline from Jaws: The Revenge, “This time, it’s personal.”
Jennifer Clark’s fastidiously accurate costumes succeed in turning actor Kevin Corbett into a believable facsimile of Robert Shaw, and Corbett does yeomanlike work delivering the famous U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue from Jaws that serves as the play’s climax. But without a Shaw in the captain’s chair, The Shark Is Broken is just treading water.
Running Time: 100 minutes with no intermission.
The Shark Is Broken plays through October 5, 2025, at Maryland Ensemble Theatre‘s Robin Drummond Main Stage, 31 W Patrick Street, Frederick, MD. Tickets are $15–$36, and can be purchased by phone at 301-694-4744, online, or in person at the MET box office, open Tuesday to Thursday, 12 – 6 p.m., Fridays 12 – 4 p.m., and one hour before performances. Pay What You Will discounts are available for students, seniors, and military starting at $7, for each performance, while supplies last.
An ASL Interpreted performance will take place September 19, 2025, at 7:30 p.m.
COVID Safety: Facemasks are strongly encouraged but not required. MET’s Safety policy can be found here.