The Shark is Broken

A 5x5 reading at BCT

Or: Old Salts

The trouble with making a movie is that it comes together where nobody sees it. So much of shooting is waiting for light, for the horizon to clear, for the sea to calm, for the giant mechanical shark named Bruce to stop sinking and in the mean time you have no idea if what you’re pouring your blood and tears into will be a blip and a flop or something that will last forever. Or so it is for three actors, Robert Shaw (Joe Golden), Roy Scheider (Nick Garcia) and Richard Dreyfuss (Jake Atkinson) stuck waiting on a tiny boat in the Atlantic and slowly going crazy.

Written by Joseph Nixon and Ian Shaw (real life son of the character, what a trip writing this must have been) The Shark is Broken sticks limpet close to the true nightmare of making Jaws, though its strict biographical bent remains twisty enough to keep the narrative compelling and burnished to a gleam with irony of all types (on their directors passion projects: “Sharks? UFOs? What’s next, dinosaurs?”) Still the winking across the decades mere gilding on a play about art and passion and regret, three men wrestling with themselves and their profession. And the jokes keep rising with the swell, while capped and wild, but the troughs in-between them are dark and deep.

Garcia balances the play across his shoulders, giving Roy an resonant equanimity, the steady pillar for his casemates to kick flip off of, while still carrying a ratcheting tension that might just snap. Richard pops and crackles; a young man, obnoxious and heroic by turns, looking for his big break, fawning and cursing and imitating his two elders, alive with Atkinson’s bite and vulnerability. For Golden though, it’s Shaw, perpetually drunk, impeccably devilish, shifting between the English and the crazed character that gives the actor wings. The mix of comedy and tragedy, wit and darkness makes Shaw an irresistible character and his actor precisely fills out his shadow, primal and mysterious cruising through the waters and never, never stopping.