The parades, the songs, the dancerly gestures. My God, the props! Squint a little, and military pomp looks a lot like theater, a troupe of boys (and more recently girls) playing dress up.
It’s this sly parallel that gives a “A Few Good Men,” the 1989 Aaron Sorkin play, better known for its 1992 screen adaptation, such stage presence. Michael Arden’s revival, which opened Thursday at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, begins with a line of Marines in dress uniforms performing a drill. Despite this elaborate choreography, Arden’s production works as theater only intermittently. It is, in military terms, an indecisive engagement.
The plot derives from a story told to Sorkin by his older sister, who, in the 1980s, was a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General Corps. At Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a Marine was injured in a hazing incident that eventually led to a trial. In Sorkin’s hands, the story, his breakthrough, became a parable, a legal thriller and a drama detailing a young man’s moral education.
That young man is Lt. Daniel Kaffee, played here by Tom Blyth, a Juilliard-trained actor and a star of the “Hunger Games” franchise. Kaffee, a junior lawyer with daddy issues, is far more comfortable on a softball field than in a courtroom. A virtuoso at plea bargaining — which spares him the effort of a trial — he treats the assignment to defend two Marines implicated in the hazing as an annoyance, at least at first. Goaded by a colleague, Sam Weinberg (Nick Blaemire), and an internal affairs lawyer, Lt. Cdr. Joanne Galloway (Krysta Rodriguez), he comes to see his clients as men worthy of his attention and care.
Sorkin, who would go on to create “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom,” has spoken of resisting offers to revive the play, which he considers part of his juvenilia. Arden’s production, which includes a few rewrites from Sorkin, doesn’t really rebut this. Plenty of what makes Sorkin Sorkin is already evident here — punchy dialogue, swift scenes, moral certainty. (The characters may not always know what is right and just, but Sorkin does.) “A Few Good Men,” though, is weakened by rickety structure and characters who are more like sketches than walking, talking (or given Sorkin’s penchant, walking and talking) human beings.
Why would Arden, a director best known for musicals that chart subtle states of feeling (a “Spring Awakening” revival, a “Parade” revival, “Maybe Happy Ending”), choose to embed with this rigid, macho world? Watching, I never had a definite sense of what drew him to the play. Despite the obvious contemporary parallels, his interpretation lumbers like an exercise, a loaded march to nowhere in particular.
The design has a similarly indecisive quality. Japhy Weideman’s lighting is typically beautiful and Dane Laffrey’s sets are flexible and fluid, to a fault. It’s ingenious how Laffrey conveys disparate settings — offices, an Air Force base, a brig, a field — with barely any changes or automation. But shouldn’t Guantánamo and Washington look meaningfully different? And too often the performers seem lost in the vastness of the Beaumont stage, like film actors desperately seeking the camera to give them a close-up.
That’s another problem. Some of the actors, like Blyth, are giving naturalistic filmic performances. For Blyth, this isn’t a dig. Tall, loose-limbed and just the right amount of callow, Blyth is wildly appealing and radiates enough star quality to nearly eclipse Tom Cruise, who played Kaffee in the film. Others, like Rodriguez, who leans into her character’s neuroses, most likely because there’s little other support in the script, are creatures of the theater. (Galloway is one of two female characters; the other, Stephanie Berry’s judge, was originally a male role.) That disjunction gives scenes a jittery, undisciplined rhythm. Where’s that tactical cohesion?
Bradley Whitford, an understudy in the original Broadway production and a Sorkin veteran, feels both miscast and misdirected in the thankless role of the antagonist. Though he has played the villain in projects like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Whitford is a cerebral actor, gifted in irony. This makes him a deeply weird fit for Lt. Col. Nathan R. Jessep, played by Jack Nicholson in the film. Jessep is a tactician, yes, but mostly driven by ego and id.
Can Whitford handle the truth? Well, his Jessep is peculiar, both physically and vocally. Whitford puffs out his chest like a gorilla and lends his voice a frayed, raspy quality not unlike a certain secretary of health and human services. The character emerges as something between a monster and a man, not wholly credible as either.
In its second half, the show settles into the familiar framework of a legal thriller. The trial includes too many asides and recesses to generate suspense, but the payoff, when it comes, is satisfying. Yet, Jessep’s big speech, which follows it, fizzles. Although salient in the movie, his ends-justify-the-means argument claiming that unethical behavior is the necessary cost of security, is less persuasive or provocative here.
Maybe that’s because it resembles real-world arguments over trans troops or arbitrary markers of fitness, like testosterone levels. Is force — particularly force as defined by “high-T” and strict gender binaries — truly what makes the military great?
Another argument in the play feels more necessary, one that asks whether personnel should obey orders without question or trust an internal ethical compass. It’s an argument we’re still having. Earlier this year, six Democratic lawmakers were targeted by the Justice Department after they released a video informing troops of an obligation to resist illegal orders. (A grand jury declined to indict them.) Sorkin would seem to agree with that video. In its better moments, “A Few Good Men” suggests that beyond performative push-ups, questioning authority and taking responsibility are better ways of showing strength.
A Few Good Men Through Jan. 10 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.
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