Considering his near ubiquity in American entertainment over the past four decades, it’s hard to imagine Aaron Sorkin as a grunt.
But sure enough, back in the mid-1980s, Sorkin was just a young, struggling playwright in New York, learning how to write — and do drugs — while holding down a series of dead-end, and deadening, jobs. (Once, he even worked handing out fliers dressed in a moose suit.)
And Sorkin said he might have stayed that way had his big sister — then a Navy lawyer — not told him, in broad outlines, of a curious case of Marine-on-Marine violence at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The incident, in 1986, involved a young private, William Alvarado, who nearly died during a hazing — part of an informal disciplinary action.
“She told me about something called ‘code red,’” Sorkin said in an interview, of his sister. “And my imagination took off.”
The code red — and the court-martial proceedings against Alvarado’s assailants — forms the narrative backbone of “A Few Good Men,” a 1989 Broadway hit, and the blockbuster 1992 movie, that catapulted Sorkin into writerly stardom, and spawned one of the most quoted lines in American pop culture: “You can’t handle the truth!”
Jack Nicholson, playing the fiery Col. Nathan R. Jessep, made that rejoinder screamingly famous in the film, trying to defend the murder of a private under his command. But the truth of the real case behind “A Few Good Men” was noticeably less dramatic: Alvarado survived, and most of the Marines charged with the attack avoided trial, pleading out to lesser charges instead, including his sister’s client.
Nonetheless, the Alvarado case has been documented in books and lawsuits and by social media sleuths. Multiple lawyers have also claimed to be the inspiration for Lt. Daniel Kaffee, the reluctantly resolute Navy defense lawyer played by Tom Cruise in the film, opposite Demi Moore, who portrayed Lt. Cmdr. Joanne Galloway, a higher-ranking, higher-minded lawyer (and the seeming stand-in for Sorkin’s sister). In 1994, five of the Marines charged in the code red incident filed a federal lawsuit against Sorkin and others involved in the film; it was dismissed “on merits,” after parties reached an “amicable settlement,” according to court documents.
For years Sorkin resisted a revival of “A Few Good Men,” but now the play is back onstage this fall at Lincoln Center Theater in Manhattan. Bradley Whitford, a star of Sorkin’s hit TV series “The West Wing,” has stepped into the role of Jessep, Tom Blyth (“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes”) is Kaffee, and Krysta Rodriguez (“Smash,” “Into the Woods”) is Galloway.
Sorkin said his trepidation about bringing the play back to Broadway was simple.
“I was very young when I wrote it,” Sorkin said. “And I thought I could do better.”
In many ways, “A Few Good Men” is an old-fashioned courtroom drama, with the lives — and honor — of two Marines on the line, before a military jury. And though he was in his 20s when it debuted, the play bears many of the hallmarks of Sorkin’s later work, including “The West Wing” and films like “The Social Network.” Characters are smart, their dialogue is snappy and big ideas are tossed around.
And like much of Sorkin’s creative output, including his new film, “The Social Reckoning,” “A Few Good Men” divided critics; back in 1989, The New York Times’s Frank Rich called it “lightweight” and “too predictable to satisfy as courtroom entertainment.” (It was a success anyway, running for 14 months on Broadway.) Over the years Sorkin has made other Broadway appearances (“The Farnsworth Invention” in 2007; a well-received adaptation of another courtroom potboiler, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” in 2018; and a reworking of the “Camelot” musical in 2023).
Earlier this year, Sorkin was approached by Michael Arden, a two-time Tony winner for his direction of a pair of wildly divergent musicals: the sci-fi robot-romance “Maybe Happy Ending,” and the topical revival of “Parade,” about an antisemitic killing.
Arden said he had been looking to do an American play, but was a little daunted by “A Few Good Men” and the possible comparisons between the stage version and the famous movie.
That was “the scariest part,” Arden said. However, he added, the play “felt kind of classic and period, but also spoke to the now.”
Indeed, both Arden and Sorkin said that a central argument of the play — whether the Marines accused of the code red were simply following orders — resonates anew at a moment in which some Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a Navy veteran, have voiced concerns about “illegal orders” emanating from the Trump administration’s Defense Department.
“There’s a relevancy now,” said Sorkin, noting that when “A Few Good Men” was first staged the most prominent example of such following-orders phenomenon was probably the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.
The production at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, where the show is running through Jan. 10, is not overtly political. But Whitford is one of its stars, and he is well-known as a stalwart Democratic Party supporter as well as for playing an idealized version of a left-wing presidential aide, Josh Lyman, on “The West Wing.”
This time around, Whitford is playing Colonel Jessep, a military man of undeniable moral certitude — even if you don’t agree with his logic. And Whitford, not surprisingly, had thoughts about the play’s significance in 2026, as he sat backstage recently surrounded by costumes of Marine uniforms.
“We know what these uniforms mean to people, and we can’t be casual, even offstage, in terms of disrespecting what these uniforms mean,” Whitford said. “And then we have a president who avoided his own service through his father’s connections and is posting pictures of himself in full-dress uniforms. I mean, ‘stolen valor’ doesn’t begin to explain this.”
“A Few Good Men” was central to Whitford’s career: He was as an understudy in the original Broadway production, and eventually went on as Kaffee. It was the beginning of a professional relationship with Sorkin that led to “The West Wing.”
“It’s so weird, man,” Whitford recalled. “I met Aaron, he’s like this 25-year-old kid. And now he’s an institution. He’s a verb,” adding an expletive.
So how does Whitford feel to be playing Jessep, the part made famous by Nicholson, a macho Semper Fi-or-die leatherneck who famously brags that he eats breakfast just beyond a fence from “4,000 Cubans who are trained to kill me”?
And more to the point, how has he approached that line, the one that is so well known that it is printed on T-shirts for sale in the Beaumont lobby?
Whitford said that he’s well aware of the expectations.
“Like a month before rehearsal, I wake up in the morning, and my adoring wife was looking at me, and I’m like, ‘Hey…’” Whitford recalled. “And she’s just like, ‘How are you going to say it?’”
For his part, Sorkin said he had approached the revival with one condition: that he’d be allowed to work on the script.
“I must have written 20, 25 drafts of the play and never really finished writing it,” Sorkin said, noting he also tweaked the script in the West End, for the national tour and, of course, for the film. “And here I am doing more rewrites now.”
Some of those rewrites concern the character of Jo, played by Rodriguez, who is the only major female character in the play. Sorkin has been criticized for not writing more three-dimensional female characters; Jo is belittled on a few occasions by Kaffee and makes a tactical error during arguments.
But she’s also persistent and able to give as good as she gets, something Rodriguez says she can relate to, as someone who has done shows in which she’s one of the few female characters.
“I guess I carry with me some ability to believe that I can get some men in order if I need to,” she said, noting that Jo outranks almost every male character in the play.
Rodriguez added that she didn’t know if Jo would have considered herself a feminist in 1989, when the play is set, but would be proud of being “capable and detail-oriented enough to get to where she is.”
“She loves the system itself, she believes in the system,” Rodriguez said in an interview. “So I don’t know that feminism is even in her vocabulary at that time. Of course, I am, and I am putting that into her vocabulary as well. But I think Jo wants to be one of the guys.”
And while Kaffee is still the play’s main hero, Jo has the last line now, before a new visual moment created by Arden.
Blyth, the latest in a line of Toms to play Kaffee, said he could imagine a little of a young Sorkin in the role of a young lawyer finding his way.
“It seems he wrote Kaffee at a time when he was really trying to figure out his voice,” Blyth said. “And was going through some growing pains himself.”
Sorkin admitted that he sometimes misses those days when he was writing “A Few Good Men,” blessed as he was by “writing when there are no expectations.”
“I feel like I’ve been getting better,” Sorkin said of his career. “But I’ve been learning in front of everybody.”
Jen Jenkins contributed research.
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