A broken shark can be a gift to a playwright. When Bruce, the mechanical shark built for “Jaws,” wouldn’t cooperate during filming, the delays left Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss with long stretches together aboard the Orca. “The Shark Is Broken” takes that stalled production as its starting point and asks what might happen when three actors, a boat and a lot of waiting collide.
Written by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, the play is a comedy about the making of a movie, not a retelling of it. There are no familiar shark attacks to recreate. The action is in the conversation: the jokes, rivalries and negotiations that arise when performers are confined together and each has a different idea of what the film, and his own place in it, should be.
Thingamajig Theatre Company will bring the play to the Pagosa Springs Center for the Arts beginning Oct. 9. Directed by Laura Moore, the production stars Tim Moore as Robert Shaw, Scott Morehead as Roy Scheider and Cameron Vargas as Richard Dreyfuss. The run through Nov. 15 is the opener for Thingamajig’s 2026-2027 fall and winter season.
The opening performance on Oct. 9 will begin at 7 p.m. and will be followed by a special talk-back with the cast and crew.
The setup offers more than backstage trivia. Shaw is a proud, volatile presence; Scheider is the steadying force; and Dreyfuss is ambitious, restless and determined to establish himself. Their friction provides the comedy, but the play’s more revealing moments come when the teasing turns serious. Beneath the quarrels about fame, craft and who carries a movie are three people confronting different versions of success.
The boat setting tightens the whole evening. The men can’t easily escape one another, and the stalled production turns dead time into the main event. That gives the play a distinctive rhythm: a laugh can land, then leave room for a more personal admission. The famous Indianapolis speech, which becomes part of the story, brings the audience close to the process behind a scene that helped make “Jaws” endure.
For local audiences, the show has the pleasures of a familiar film seen from an unfamiliar angle. Fans will recognize the world and the personalities; newcomers can follow the human drama without knowing every detail of the movie. At its heart, “The Shark Is Broken” is about creative work under pressure and what people reveal when they are waiting for the machine to start again.
“The Shark Is Broken” will run Oct. 9 through Nov. 15 at the Pagosa Springs Center for the Arts. Tickets are available at pagosacenter.org or by calling the box office at (970) 731-SHOW (7469).
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