YOUNGSTOWN — The shark may be broken, but Youngstown Playhouse’s production is in shipshape.

“The Shark Is Broken,” a play about the making of the 1975 film “Jaws,” opened Friday before a sell-out crowd at The Playhouse Downtown, which proved to be a perfect venue for the intimate, three-character story.

The movie was plagued by delays, cost overruns and other calamities during production, in part because director Steven Spielberg chose to shoot the film on the ocean instead of a studio lot and the mechanical sharks built for the movie seldom worked.

In the era of the disaster movie, “Jaws” was feared to be a real-life disaster in the film industry … at least until audiences got a chance to see it. It earned $260 million in North America, making it at the time the highest grossing film ever. It is credited (and blamed) with creating Hollywood’s “summer blockbuster” mentality.

Spielberg isn’t a character in the play. “Shark” focuses on Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider, the actors who played shark hunter Quint, marine biologist Matt Hooper and Amity Police Chief Martin Brody, respectively. The three very different men spent long hours together waiting for the weather, the mechanicals and everything else to cooperate in order to get that day’s shots.

Director Brendan Boyle couldn’t have done a better job with casting. Chuck Kettering as Dreyfuss, Cox as Shaw and Corban Baker as Scheider all look enough like the men they’re playing that it’s easy for the audience to suspend disbelief.

The way they inhabit the characters is more impressive. The roles require their performances to work on multiple levels, capturing the real life actors as well as the characters they portray, and the three of them accomplish both.

The banter and verbal sparring among the three crackles with energy, even when saddled with expository dialogue that exists only to deliver tidbits about the film and the performers. The more physical confrontations are equally believable. It felt like two guys fighting, not executing blocking.

“The Shark Is Broken” is filled with big laughs, both in the script by Ian Shaw (Robert Shaw’s son) and Joseph Nixon and in physical bits, such as Dreyfuss struggling to put on a jacket when one of the sleeves is wrong side out. If the mechanical sharks had worked as well as the well-oiled machine created by Boyle, Kettering, Cox and Baker, this play might not exist.

The attention to detail carries over to the technical elements. Costuming and hair — Kettering’s tousled, Cox’s bushy sideburns and the extreme part on Baker’s scalp — are spot on. Jack Hanna’s set design will feel familiar to those who know the movie.

With the action concentrated on the three men, Johnny Pecano’s sound design plays an integral role in hinting at the chaos beyond the confines of the boat with sputtering engines and failing mechanics echoing in the background. Ellen Licitra’s lighting delicately shifts when the boat is where the actors are hanging out compared to when it is a live set. There’s also just enough light for viewers to sense what is happening during the montage sequences that take place between the main scenes to convey the passage of time.

The Playhouse production is thoroughly entertaining, and it’s hard to imagine it being done better elsewhere. That said, it’s also not surprising that “The Shark Is Broken” only lasted three months on Broadway.

The script is overly reliant on dialogue that is either prophetic or foolish when viewed through a contemporary lens, whether it’s Scheider saying after Richard Nixon’s resignation, “There will never be a more immoral President than Tricky Dicky,” or Shaw insisting that no one will be talking about “Jaws” 50 years from now.

It says some things about fathers and sons, art vs. commerce and craft vs. celebrity, but the play primarily is a love letter to an iconic film. As someone who’s seen “Jaws” more times than I can count and watched the documentaries and read the articles about the making of it, I am the target audience for this play, and I enjoyed it more than anything I’ve seen for a long time.

Someone who saw “Jaws” decades ago and hasn’t thought much about it since may not be as enamored with it, but the performances and the Playhouse’s staging offer plenty to enjoy.