For nine weeks in 1974, off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard, the shooting of “Jaws” was repeatedly delayed by the whims of its temperamental stars. Bruce was the name given to the three mechanical predators built to simulate the great white shark at the heart of the story. Occasionally they wondered if it might not have been better to train an actual great white for the role. After seeing “The Shark Is Broken,” a play about that disastrous shoot, you may wonder the opposite: whether it might not have been better to cast the movie with mechanical humans. All of that is faithfully rendered in “The Shark Is Broken,” which opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, in a production directed by Guy Masterson.

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Persons: ”, Bruce, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider bickered, Guy Masterson, There’s, Duncan Henderson, Adam Cork, John Williams’s Locations: Martha’s