At Springs Ensemble Theatre, actors portray actors in a comic blast from cinema’s past.
Can’t get enough of the 1975 film Jaws? Take a deep dive into its making with a behind-the-scenes play, The Shark is Broken, running through Sept. 14 at the Springs Ensemble Theatre (SET).
The play focuses the last half of the film’s shoot, on the water off Martha’s Vineyard, on the deck of the Orca. Spielberg’s lead characters — Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw — are in and out of character as filming stalls with repairs to the mechanical shark. However, the playwrights cleverly pause the hunt and turn a keen eye to the prickly friction between the actors portraying a salty captain, neurotic oceanographer and arrogant police chief. (One of the writers, Ian Shaw, is the son of Robert Shaw.)…