As part of their 10th anniversary season, The Black Box Theatre in downtown Moline is presenting the QC premiere of “The Shark is Broken” by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, opening Friday, June 12.
The play about the classic “Jaws” tells the story of the tense blockbuster filming in 1974 and ’75, when the mechanical shark named “Bruce” continually broke down, and forced the film's three lead actors — Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider — to be stuck together on the boat Orca. '
Filming stalls. Days turn into weeks, and the actors’ different personalities, approaches to filmmaking and acting in general start to take a toll. Shaw is the veteran actor; the young and ambitious Dreyfuss; with Scheider attempting to be the peacekeeper.
The three-man show (co-written by and starring Robert Shaw’s son Ian) premiered in July 2019 at the Rialto Theatre in England, moving on to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The West End production was postponed due to COVID but opened in October 2021 and ultimately ended up on Broadway from July to August 2023.
A review by Entertainment Tonight noted “There are also laughs aplenty as the three argue about their billing on the movie poster, discuss the relationship between golf and sperm, break into impromptu song, and engage in all manner of games and bets to pass the time.”
A 2021 review of the play in Britain’s The Standard said:
“Do you need to have seen the film to care? Not at all - I’m no Jaws aficionado, and I was hooked. Across the play’s 90-minute running time, the men discuss art, money, fame, masculinity and fatherhood. It’s both a love letter to film-making and a searching study of how to live a good life amid all of its difficulties.”
Director Jeremy Littlejohn leads a cast featuring Circa ’21 veteran actor Brad Hauskins as Robert Shaw, area playwright, actor and designer Alexander Richardson as Richard Dreyfuss with Chase Austin taking on the role of Roy Scheider. Costume design is by Bradley Robert Jensen, set design and build by Black Box co-founder Lora Adams and her crew (Michael Kopriva and Jeremy Littlejohn), with Heather Reid Hauskins providing the show's light design.
“This is our second premiere of the 10th season,” said Adams. “I’m so happy to introduce new plays, actors and directors to our audiences.”
“It's been a dream,” Littlejohn said in a WVIK interview Tuesday, June 9. “This is my first show with Black Box, and I always admired that space. But I mean, my schedule being what it is, I have to kind of pick and choose when I can go out and do another project. And Lora’s been amazing to work with, and the cast is phenomenal, so it's great. We're definitely ready. When you're used to 10 days of rehearsal, we're definitely ready after a month for sure.”
At Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse, he is the production manager, and has handled over 1,200 submissions from performers in the past eight months (the theater’s “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Wizard of Oz” this season have about 25 performers or less for each).
“What that essentially means is I'm the theater department head, so I'm responsible for keeping everybody on track, keeping everybody on budget, communicating, making sure all the departments are communicating,” Littlejohn said. “I also maintain the cast housing arrangements here. I write all of the contracts, do all of the hiring and all of the contract negotiations.”
Littlejohn has worn many hats in his career and been involved in over 275 productions across the country. Some of his notable directing projects include Floyd Collins, Misery, Little Shop of Horrors, The Glass Menagerie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Moon Over Buffalo, Carousel, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Kiss Me Kate, and The Shark is Broken. In addition to being a director, he is also an accomplished actor, lighting designer and teacher.
While he’s never directed at BBT before, Littlejohn did direct two shows in 2023 – “Driving Miss Daisy” at the former Mockingbird on Main, Davenport, and “Singin’ in the Rain” at Music Guild, Moline.
The spark and thrill of creation
He loves the rehearsal process in creating a show.
“The finished product is obviously very important, but those 10 days is where you live, creating it and getting it ready and molding it and making it what you want and what you believe the audience wants to see,” Littlejohn said. “So it just becomes more. Whereas when you're an actor, when you get to the finished product and you run for two months, it's about maintaining it and about discovering new things as the run goes along and that sort of thing.”
“I’m at that point in my career with directing, at least, because the previous two theaters, the best way I can describe them is show factories like the one that I came right before here. We opened 10 productions in a year, and I had to direct six of them,” he said of the Harmony Theater in Hillsboro, Ind. “You get pretty creatively burnt out doing that. As a director, I've had many opportunities to do big names, that kind of thing. And so where I'm at in my career as a director is I'm seeking out more artsy projects.
“Last year was my second 'Mary Poppins.' This is my third 'Fiddler.' This is my third 'Wizard of Oz.' So I've done a lot of these basic Golden Age and that kind of thing shows for these regional theaters,” Littlejohn said. “As a director now, I'm more selective about what shows I want to direct. I'm looking for passion projects. And ‘The Shark Is Broken’ fits that bill.”
He got obsessed with “The Shark is Broken” partly because he’s long been a huge fan of “Jaws” (1975), directed by Steven Spielberg (at age 27), and credited with being modern film’s first blockbuster.
“When I saw it was a play about the making of it, the history of the making of that movie is obviously well-known and huge because of the shark not working and basically forcing Steven Spielberg to turn it into more of a Hitchcock-style film, which made it better,” Littlejohn said. “He even said in a documentary, if the shark actually worked, you wouldn't have a lot of the iconic images from the movie.”
A deep, amazing script
“When I started reading about it, realized that it was written by Robert Shaw's son, who also plays him. He played him on the West End and on Broadway and on the tour, and he looked just like him,” he said of Ian Shaw. “And so I just kind of became obsessed with it.
"And once I got into it, I realized that this is, you know, it could seem like it's a trifle, but it is actually an amazing script. Like initially I didn't get the script as much credit as it deserved. And now that I'm digging deep into it, it's like, oh, this is actually really wonderful and really well fleshed out. And he knew exactly what he was doing.”
Littlejohn was obsessed with “Jaws,” which began as a best-selling book, also because growing up in Elkhart, Ind., he was fascinated by marine life.
“I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was in elementary school. And so it was the kind of thing where it terrified me,” he recalled. “I was scared to death of it. And all of the stories you hear about people being afraid to go in the water applied to me too, like as an elementary school kid. It's funny to think, but like I was afraid to go into the deep end of the pool for a while, you know, thinking that. There's an irrational fear. But it was still there.”'
The whole play is the three actors waiting around for the mechanical shark to be fixed. It doesn't appear in much of the movie because it didn't work, which heightened the film's suspense.
“Essentially, you're a fly on the wall on set. That's how I would describe the play. And they talk about everything,” Littlejohn said. “You learn how they interacted with each other. You learn things about their personal lives that you never knew about these huge stars and how you always hear the stories of Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss did not get along. And this gives you some insight into that.
“So they talk about some deep stuff. It's mostly a light-hearted comedy. It's very funny,” the director said. “But they do definitely go into some moments of where Shaw's talking about his father committing suicide and Roy Scheider talking about his abusive father and Richard Dreyfuss talking about the extreme demands that his parents put on him.
"So it goes a little deeper than you would think, but it just gives you some insight into how they interacted and what they had to do while they're literally waiting around a shoot. Because there are plenty of times where they're just literally waiting. They come to set and they have to wait all day.”
Robert Shaw lost his alcoholic father to suicide when he was 12, and Shaw himself was alcoholic, and died of a heart attack at 51 (just three years after the release of “Jaws”), when Ian Shaw was 8.
The play was penned partly as a tribute to Ian’s father, Littlejohn said.
“And just the fact that he looks exactly like his dad,” he said. “The script reads like it's a tribute in that Indianapolis speech.”
That famous speech in “Jaws” refers to the USS Indianapolis, which in July 1945 completed a top-secret high-speed trip to deliver uranium for “Little Boy,” the first nuclear weapon used in combat, to the Tinian Naval Base, and subsequently departed for the Philippines on training duty. On July 30, the ship was torpedoed by the Japanese Navy and of 1,195 crewmen, only 316 survived, many killed by sharks.
The importance of Black Box
Littlejohn admires Lora Adams’ focus on lesser-known, contemporary plays, and the intimacy of the 60-seat BBT space.
“I’m a huge, huge advocate for that kind of thing,” he said. “I love little black-box spaces like the Speakeasy next door (to Circa). I love that space and I love the creativity that comes with it because it's real easy with a big budget to create these giant shows. But I love the little theaters that maybe don't have as much as large a budget, and you have to figure out how to make this work in a smaller space with less frills.
“And so I'm a big fan of what she does, and I believe it's important because it can't just all be ‘Church Basement Ladies’ and those kind of shows,” Littlejohn said. “You have to give some of these smaller, artsy shows a voice, even though people don't necessarily know what they are and may not know that they want to see them, but when you put them on, they love it.”
“One of the things I like about it is that there's nowhere to hide,” he said of BBT. “It basically strips away all the crap and makes you focus on acting. And you can't hide there. You could reach out and touch them if you wanted. So it's scary and exhilarating, for sure.”
Littlejohn also treasures working with Hauskins (a longtime Circa veteran and Bootlegger), making his Black Box debut.
“Brad is a mega ‘Jaws’ fan. So it's very much a passion project for him as well,” he said.
At 1623 5th Ave., Moline, the show opens on June 12th and runs through the 27th. Performances are on June 12, 13, 19, 20, 25, 26, 27 at 7:30 p.m. and June 14 and 21 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $18 and available at theblackboxtheatre.com or at the door.
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