PACA's May Production The Shark is Broken Has Emotional Bite
We're gonna need a bigger boat (or a smaller theater)
Friday, May 15
Hollywood in the 1970s was a wild, raucous time – but on the other end of the spectrum were Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfuss, who dealt with chaos of another sort while filming the 1975 film Jaws. That chaos – represented by both external and internal conflict – is at the center of The Shark is Broken, a one-act play which first premiered in 2019, and is making its debut at the Performing Artists Collective Alliance (PACA) for a limited run this month.
"The play, which was co-written by Robert Shaw's son Ian, really does serve, in part, as a love letter from Ian to his father," explained Kate Neubert-Lechner, director of this production and a PACA regular. "At its core [it] is a character study into these three men and the tenuous relationships they formed while filming the movie and waiting for Bruce [the mechanical shark] to be ready for filming."
Of course, staging a play that's about the making of a film presents its own challenges, the main one being, according to Neubert-Lechner, putting together an authentic set, which in this instance has been designed and built by JR Fabin. What presented zero issues was the casting, with Rob Bush, Dan Strip, and Jesse Cammarata tackling the three main characters. Neubert-Lechner described their chemistry as amazing, and said, "I feel like my biggest job as a director on this one is to get out of their way, let them play, and help them hone in on what's going to work the best."
The Shark is Broken is part-comedy, part-drama, and while the audience might not relate to the making of a movie, Neubert-Lechner said that "despite the outer bravado of two of the characters in particular, underneath is deep insecurity and loneliness," a conflicted type of person with whom we've all been familiar at some point and whose bite we might have felt.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday shows at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday matinee at 2 p.m. // PACA, 1505 State St. // $22.95 // For tickets and info: tickets.eriereader.com
