‘A Few Good Men’ Broadway Review: Bradley Whitford And Tom Blyth Handle The Truth

When it arrives on stage – it being “You can’t handle the truth!,” one of the most famous bits of dialogue in movie history – the phrase feels both very, very familiar and ever so slightly tossed off, maybe even rushed, as if this Broadway revival of Aaron Sorkin‘s A Few Good Men doesn’t want cheap applause or an audience even momentarily distracted by cinematic nostalgia.

It’s a telling moment in director Michael Arden’s handsome staging of this Lincoln Center Theater revival starring Bradley Whitford, Tom Blyth and Krysta Rodriguez, a fresh attempt on a familiar property that almost feels vital.

In some ways the play is more relevant now than it was back in ’89 when a young, largely unknown Sorkin unleashed both it and his unique narrative voice on an unsuspecting public.

But if that relevancy – this is, after all, a tale in which a lawless, egotistical, bullying commander shifts the blame for a stupid, negligent action from himself to the two patriotic dupes blindly following his orders – seems more than a tad obvious, its power to shock feels drained. Not even as skilled a wordsmith as Sorkin and an actor as in control of his own talents as Whitford can offer a new take of villainy interesting enough to spur some newfound, good-faith reconsideration after all these years. As Sorkin proved with his remarkable adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird, revivals work best when they demand an audience re-think its long held assumptions. A Few Good Men would be more compelling now if Sorkin could make us believe, even for a scene or two, that there just are some very fine people on both sides arguments. The bullying narcissist at the dark core of A Few Good Men has nothing to say that we don’t hear, in one version or another, every day on the news, leaving the courtroom drama without much drama, let along sting.

If you haven’t seen the famous 1992 film adaptation starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore in a while, here’s a refresher: The year is 1989, the setting the United States Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. If Gitmo hasn’t yet become the shorthand for torture that it will be post-9/11, it is, in Sorkin’s telling, no less shady: A young Marine private has died following what seems to have been some sort of hazing incident, and two fellow Marines (Collin Kelly-Sordelet and Lavel Schley) have been charged with murder. But who ordered the “code red” that gave the go-ahead to the bullying that goes terribly wrong.

Tasked with defending the accused dupes is the callow young Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Blyth), whose inexperience and seeming lack of seriousness likely has much to do with why, exactly, he was chosen for this very serious case (the audience will likely catch on well before he does). He’ll be assisted by his pal, the somewhat more purposeful Lietenant Sam Weinberg (Nick Blaemire) and the passionately inquisitive internal affairs officer Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway (Rodriguez).

It’s Galloway who senses early on that the two low-level defendants are mere scapegoats and that there’s a conspiracy going on, likely involving the revered (or at least feared) base commander Colonel Nathan R. Jessep (Whitford), who values rigid control, tight conformity, his own reputation and a future career in Washington in just about equal measure.

If the heart and soul of A Few Good Men is courtroom drama, this new revival – played out on the airy set design of the ever-reliable Dane Laffrey – feels altogether more expansive, using the large Lincoln Center stage to suggest that the judicial goings-on are merely one portion of the metaphoric stakes being waged. There’s a lonely army cot that soon doubles as an autopsy table, a courtroom set-up area, a locker-room area, even an eagles-nest observation tower looming overhead. No mistaking the point: Truth can hide in the plainest of sights, but not for long.

And that brings us to the line so famous it’s printed across t-shirts on sale at the Lincoln Center merch table. When Blyth’s Kaffee demands the truth, he skips Cruise’s sputtering delivery for a more conversational tone (a legit choice), though Whitford’s delivery of the punchline – to repeat, “You can’t handle the truth!” – is as forceful as it needs to be. All in all, the famous exchange is less histrionic than we might remember.

Anti-climactic? A bit maybe, but I suspect that’s less to do with the familiarity of the line than with the now-rather timeworn sentiment behind it. We not only can handle the truth, we’re thoroughly aware of it – the notion that our lives are controlled and even protected by shadowy, too-powerful string-pullers and the conspiracies in which they cloak themselves is so taken for granted now that its big reveal as some sort of deeply hidden agenda seems altogether quaint. We certainly don’t need our eyes opened by the deus ex whistleblower that Sorkin gives us rather late in the game.

The play’s not-so-mysterious mystery has the unfortunate consequence of making the crusading defenders of justice seem more than a little naive in their stumble-bum approach to building a case, and here is where Sorkin missed an opportunity to engage in the level of revisionism that made his Mockingbird such an astonishing achievement. Imagine if he had rewritten A Few Good Men to give the one good woman – Joanne, the JAG officer – enough material that she became more than just a Jiminy Cricket pushing the unambitious Kaffee toward heroism? At the very least, Rodriguez’s performance, though committed, mightn’t seem so ancillary.

Blyth fares better, understandable since his character has the most notable (if entirely expected) arc, going from frat-boy arrogance to righteous justice-seeker. The actor puts his boyishness to good use here, and makes the transition to Atticus Finch-in-dress-whites a credible dramatic pay-off.

If Blyth makes good use of his own amiability, Whitford subverts his. Best known for his earnest politico Josh Lyman in Sorkin’s The West Wing, Whitford here turns zealous and mean, his Colonel Jessup ruthlessness incarnate, intractable and convinced of his own indispensable value to society and order. Whitford’s barreling performance gives A Few Good Men a worthy villain, combining a blindered worldview with self-serving careerism that makes for a depressingly recognizable monster.

From Jessup’s perspective, the namby-pamby do-gooders of the world rely on these ruthless, truth-knowing rule-breakers for their very lives, and while real-world purveyors of that mind-set are in no short supply, their lawless justifications are the stuff of daily headlines, not deeply hidden revelation. A Few Good Men, even in a production as generously appointed and grandly performed as this, offers truths that just aren’t that hard to handle.

Title: A Few Good Men
Venue: Broadway’s Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center
Written by: Aaron Sorkin
Directed by: Michael Arden
Cast: Tom Blyth, Bradley Whitford, Krysta Rodriguez, Stephanie Berry, Nick Blaemire, Michael Braugher, Christopher Gurr, Billy Eugene Jones, Collin Kelly-Sordelet, Shunté Lofton, Michael Oberholtzer, Lavel Schley, Thom Sesma, Daniel Velez, John Zdrojeski
Running time: 2 hr 35 min (including intermission)