THREE MEN IN A BOAT,
WAITING FOR A FISH

At Laguna Playhouse, the making of a blockbuster
becomes a chamber piece about ego, craft, and survival

Gildart Jackson, Will Block, and Adam Poole

The mechanical shark that tormented Steven Spielberg during the filming of Jaws in the summer of 1974 was nicknamed Bruce, after the director’s lawyer. Bruce sank. Bruce jammed. Bruce had to be hauled back into position while the tide shifted and the actors waited, squinting into light that was supposed to look like terror. The schedule collapsed. The budget bled out quietly into the Atlantic. What survived was not just a blockbuster but a story about catastrophe turning useful.

The Shark Is Broken is less interested in the triumph than in the waiting—in the narrow strip of time when three men sat on a boat with nothing to do but talk and drink and measure themselves against one another, unaware that the thing refusing to work was about to make them permanent.

Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon’s The Shark Is Broken, now staged by Santa Barbara’s Ensemble Theatre Company at Laguna Playhouse, takes that legend and stuffs it into a very small boat. The three lead actors of Jaws—Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, and Roy Scheider—are stuck aboard a replica of the Orca, the movie’s fishing vessel, killing time between takes while Bruce refuses to cooperate. They drink. They bicker. They play cards. They drink more. The shoot was supposed to last seven weeks; it dragged on past seventeen. Nobody knows whether the film will be any good. Nobody knows, naturally, that it will invent the summer blockbuster.

Will Block and Adam Poole

The play premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, traveled through the West End (picking up an Olivier nomination), played Toronto, then landed a Broadway run at the Golden Theatre in 2023. But its real origin story is private. Ian Shaw is the son of Robert Shaw, who died of a heart attack at 51 in 1978, three years after Jaws. The younger Shaw got hold of his father’s drinking diary, a log in which the elder Shaw tracked his daily consumption with the hopeless conscientiousness of a man losing a war.

One page: “No alcohol.”
A few pages later: two bottles of wine.

You can see the attempt. You can see the failure.

Robert Shaw’s own father had been an alcoholic who killed himself when Shaw was twelve; the diary must have read, to the son, like a letter from a country he already knew the geography of. Ian Shaw has said the diary made him understand something about his father that he hadn’t before. The play grew out of that understanding. It grew out of grief, too, obviously, but it started with the diary. What could have been a backstage lark became a son’s attempt to sit with his father in a room for 95 minutes and watch him very carefully.

Gildart Jackson, Will Block, and Adam Poole

In the play’s earlier life, Ian Shaw performed the role of Robert Shaw himself. That arrangement carried an almost frightening charge, the son literally putting on the father’s clothes, pouring the father’s drinks, channeling the bravado and the rot. Here at Laguna Playhouse, directed by Pesha Rudnick, Gildart Jackson takes on Robert Shaw, and while he cannot bring the autobiographical voltage, he brings something else: he knows how to play a man whose authority is entirely performance.

Jackson’s Shaw is a Shakespearean blusterer who seems to suspect, somewhere beneath the whiskey and the declamation, that he is bluffing. He swaggers. He pours another drink, and you watch the swagger curdle into something closer to panic—the kind of panic that comes from knowing you are performing confidence for an audience of two men who may or may not be buying it. I believed him.

Will Block plays Dreyfuss, and he is very funny. Block has a comedian’s instinct for the rhythm of anxiety, the way a young man who desperately wants respect from his elders will overcorrect in every direction at once. He bounces off Jackson like a man picking a fight he knows he’ll lose.

But the performance has more to it than timing: there is a scene in which Dreyfuss, having been belittled one too many times, turns serious, and Block lets the comedy drain out of his face like water out of a tipped glass. It is a good, surprising moment.

Gildart Jackson and Will Block

Adam Poole’s Roy Scheider is the quietest of the three and, for stretches, the one I watched most closely. Scheider was the middle child of this particular family—the professional who kept showing up and doing solid work while the other two went at each other’s throats. He is the one who listens. Poole plays this with a tired steadiness that the play leans on more than it may realize. When Jackson and Block are circling each other, Poole is the reason the boat doesn’t capsize.

Fred Kinney’s scenic design puts us aboard a scaled recreation of the Orca, and it is tight enough that the actors have to negotiate each other physically, which is the point. You can feel the claustrophobia before anyone says a word.

Elijah Frankle’s projections stretch the ocean across the full width of the stage, and what they do best is remind you that nobody onshore cares. All that water, gorgeous and indifferent, while three men on a boat try to figure out who is winning an argument that doesn’t matter.

Rudnick lets the space do the work. She doesn’t overblock it. The men pace and crowd each other and there is nowhere to go, and after a while you stop noticing the set and start feeling the trap, which is exactly right.

Gildart Jackson, Will Block, Adam Poole

The structural spine of the play is Robert Shaw’s agonized relationship with the USS Indianapolis monologue—the speech in which Quint describes surviving a mass shark attack after the warship sank in 1945.

If you have seen Jaws, you will remember this speech.

The real Robert Shaw, who won the Hawthornden Prize for his novel The Sun Doctor and whose play The Man in the Glass Booth ran 264 performances on Broadway, hated the existing versions and rewrote it himself.

Nixon and Shaw use it as a recurring test: early on, Shaw attempts it drunk and butchers it, and the whole evening tilts toward the moment when he will deliver it clean. We know it is coming. We know what it will sound like.

There is a version of this play that would rush to get there. This one does not.

The speech becomes more than a test of sobriety or craft. It is the place where Robert Shaw tries to make the story his own, turning a disaster into something solid he can stand on. Watching Jackson get there—watching the bluster fall away and the real voice come through—I thought: this is also what the elder Shaw was doing with his novels, with The Man in the Glass Booth, with every piece of writing he fought to make stick. He was trying to survive in a medium that wouldn’t kill him.

Gildart Jackson and WIll Block

On that cramped boat, the men are not only waiting for a shark to work. They are trying out who they are in front of each other—testing wit, toughness, intelligence, seeing what lands and what doesn’t. The monologue offers one version of survival. The rest of the play watches them circle it, each in his own way, as if it might steady something none of them can quite name.

The script has plenty of winking jokes about Spielberg’s future filmography and Nixon-era politics, and the audience loved them. I confess that this sort of humor—characters unknowingly predicting a future the audience has already lived through—tends to wear on me.

The Broadway critics in 2023 mostly sharpened their knives, several arguing that the play’s insights into Hollywood didn’t go much deeper than Carl Gottlieb’s making-of memoir, The Jaws Log. The real Richard Dreyfuss, who attended the Broadway opening and posed gamely for photos backstage, later told Vanity Fair that he thought the play made him look foolish and that Ian Shaw had exaggerated the famous feud.

He has a point.

The play is not an authoritative account of anything. It is closer to a séance.

Gildart Jackson, Will Block, Adam Poole

What this production gets right—and what I think the Broadway critics undersold—is what the play knows that its characters don’t. Underneath the drinking and the bickering and the movie trivia, The Shark Is Broken is watching three men on the last afternoon before their lives fork in directions none of them would choose.

Robert Shaw, 47 during filming and privately aware he is drinking himself to death, will not live to see 52.
Dreyfuss is about to become a star.
Scheider is about to be Scheider forever—solid and underappreciated and gone too soon.

None of them know any of this.

They are just three guys on a boat, sunburned and bored and a little mean, trying to make a movie about a fish.

At the end they say goodbye with the awkward formality of men who have shared too much and will never talk about it. The lights go down and you sit there holding three futures that the men on that boat will never get to compare notes about.

Gildart Jackson, Adam Poole, Will Block

Here in Laguna Beach, a couple of blocks from the Pacific, the play nearly does everything it needs to do. That is largely because Jackson, Block, and Poole, under Rudnick’s naturalistic direction, are good enough to make you forget—for long stretches—that the script is not as deep as what they are putting into it.

With lesser actors the seams would show more clearly, the winking jokes landing heavier and the emotional payoff having to earn itself without three performances quietly doing the earning for it.

But I kept thinking about those winking jokes—the ones where the audience laughs because it knows what’s coming. The play uses that foreknowledge for easy laughs all evening and then, in its final minutes, asks the same foreknowledge to carry real grief.

It can’t quite do both.

Something leaks out. The séance works, but the irony that matters most arrives slightly diluted, and that is the difference between a very good play and the great one hiding inside it.

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photos by Jason Niedle/Thesos

The Shark Is Broken
Ensemble Theatre Company
Laguna Playhouse
606 Laguna Canyon Drive in Laguna Beach, CA
Wed at 7:30; Thurs at 2 & 7:30; Fri at 7:30; Sat at 2 & 7:30; Sun at 1 & 5:30
95 minutes no intermission
ends on March 22, 2026
for tickets ($56-$121), call 949.497.2787 x1 or visit Laguna Playhouse

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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