SHARK BAIT

The Jaws” ecosystem and Broadway's "The Shark Is Broken."

- HELEN SHAW

Forty-eight Junes ago, summer changed. A twenty-seven-year-old, as yet unknown Steven Spielberg released a shark movie, and thanks in part to some stunning casting choices-Roy Scheider as a decent police chief, Richard Dreyfuss in peppery scientist mode, the flinty British actor Robert Shaw as the Ahab-like fisherman Quint-the result ate the box office. "Jaws" shifted Hollywood, which shifted the culture as a whole. At sea, when a whale dies, it can fall to the ocean floor and decay into a nutrient-rich structural reef, the basis of a food web that can last for decades. When "Jaws" landed in 1975, it generated its own ecosystem, too. The modern movie industry, with its summer tentpoles, youth-oriented programming, and marketing blitzes, was born in its guts.

"The Shark Is Broken," a play by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, now at the John Golden Theatre, also takes shelter in the "Jaws" skeleton: it's a behind-the-scenes comedy that imagines frequently irritable chats among the movie's three main actors as they wait around for weeks, delayed by the movie's malfunctioning rubber-skinned star. Scheider (Colin Donnell), Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman), and Shaw (Ian Shaw, both writing about and playing his own father) idle away the time on the set's lobster boat, which bobs in the ocean off Martha's Vineyard. They talk about everything under the New England sun, like Dreyfuss's yearning for fame and Shaw's constant boozing, and we see how desperate the eager pup (Dreyfuss) is to impress the salty dog (Shaw). There's also a certain amount of meta-theatrical ironizing, subtle as a harpoon. "Do you really think anyone will be talking about this in fifty years?" Robert Shaw scoffs at the two younger men. Thunk.