Having seen Aaron Sorkin’s play “A Few Good Men,” at the Music Box, I can easily see why he affects some people the way he does. (Reporters for New York magazine and 7 Days seem to have gone out of their way to present him as smug and self-aggrandizing.) The play is everything that Broadway used to be when it was trying to be “important”—glib, superficial, and intermittently absorbing and entertaining. But to me it seemed a cross between television sitcom and a literary frame-up. “A Few Good Men” starts from the premise that anyone who would want to belong to the Marine Corps (or, by extension, any other branch of the United States armed forces) must be either a fool or a bully, and then proceeds to dramatize the point. There is a captain Queeg/Ollie North figure, a lieutenant colonel (played by Stephen Lang) who is willing to go outside the law to “protect the people” and turns out to be a psychotic; a Jim Bakker figure (a Bible-thumping officer, played by Ted Marcoux); and an array of ignorant, inarticulate soldiers too stupid to think for themselves—all the people we intellectuals love to hate.
The plot revolves around a Marine Corps cover-up: a private at the American naval base in Cuba—the sort of gentle, neurasthenic misfit who falls behind on a run, complains about his superior officers, and worries about his health—has been killed, accidentally or not, by a couple of men in his own unit. They claim (or one of them does) that they were merely carrying out orders from above, engaging in a little disciplinary roughhouse; and the question of their innocence or guilt hinges on the existence or nonexistence of certain unwritten rules and practices within the Marine Corps. To defend the two marines, Sorkin brings in all the people we love to love: a glib, wisecracking, softball-playing Harvard Law School graduate (Tom Hulce), who, in spite of the fact that he graduated fourth in his class and is the son of a famous dead civil rights lawyer, has somehow managed to wind up in the Navy; a woman lawyer; and a sweet, funny Jew (Mark Nelson) whose baby girl is just beginning to talk. They’re an attractive bunch: bright, witty, and comradely—like a yearbook committee. What’s more, they’re underdogs. The Tom Hulce character has no courtroom experience, and the woman lawyer “can’t seem to defend people.” The first-act curtain goes down on Tom Hulce remarking, “So this is what a courtroom looks like!”
Most courtroom drama—“The Eumenides” excepted—probably exists in some sense to pander to liberal values: it pits human weakness and aberration (violence, passion, zeal) against abstract principle, purporting to examine both within the structure of civilized society. And while human faults are interesting, humanitas itself is what counts, so the values of liberal humanism are almost always going to win out. But there’s usually a moment when the hero, who stands against the ideas we want to see refuted, defends the worth of the man who champions them (“Inherit the Wind”), or else we, in discovering that the men on trial are guilty, also see the tragedy of their predicament (“Breaker Morant”). Even something as hokey as “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” allows an argument to be made for the bad guys: the climax of the play comes not with victory in the courtroom—the unmasking of Captain Queeg as a lunatic—but with the coda, in which the hero tells off the cynical intellectual, defending the Captain Queegs of this world. Sorkin isn’t interested in the fate of the two defendants in his play: he wants to put the military ethos on trial. The charges against the two poor, simple marines are dropped, but they lose what they valued most—their Marinehood—because Sorkin wants to punish them for having wanted it in the first place. So eager is he, moreover, to ingratiate himself with his audience that he gives the defense-of-the-military speech to the psychotic colonel, which is what makes “A Few Good Men” so much more a put-up job than a play.
Don Scardino’s production must be the slickest thing since oil started spilling. There are fast and portentous light cues (by Thomas R. Skelton); one of those “a few tables and chairs” sets (by Ben Edwards), which free a playwright from having to adhere to any sort of structure or design; and a lot of old-style, over-the-top Broadway acting by an ace cast. Messrs. Hulce and Lang play shamelessly to the audience (as they should). Robert Hogan brings substantial dignity to a role that amounts to a plot device (a captain whose suicide blows the case wide open), and Megan Gallagher’s performance as the hapless lawyerette (Sorkin’s view, not mine) should win Sorkin a contract for a comedy series. Best, perhaps, are the marines—particularly Victor Love and Michael Dolan, as the two defendants, and Geoffrey Nauffts, as a comic witness. All the same, only once—when the prosecutor (Clark Gregg) has at the woman lawyer in the way that men sometimes go tauntingly at women who try to pull rank on them—is any genuine theatrical spark struck, and you get the feeling that the heat comes from the actors, not the script.
“A Few Good Men” pretends to be against bullies and to teach the children’s-book lesson of courage-in-nonconformity. (“You don’t need to wear a patch on your arm to have honor,” the hero tells one of the defendants, and the crestfallen ex-marine squares his shoulders, salutes, and strides offstage.) But the night I saw “A Few Good Men” one lone man in the audience—someone perhaps with some knowledge or experience of military service—tried to applaud the villain’s big speech, and the audience laughed at him. The whole theater was filled with titters. That must have taken a certain amount of courage: the man knew he’d be clapping alone. (He’d tried once before to applaud the martial viewpoint, and people had turned and stared.) I meant to go up to him afterward and say something, but he left before the curtain call, and I had to stay and applaud the performance.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, November 27, 1989