Citadel production of A Few Good Men delivers tense courtroom drama at high volume
Marines never quiet in A Few Good Men
One thing about courtroom dramas involving Marines: you never have to wonder who anyone is, despite all the khaki. None of that “halt, who goes there?” stuff. No mumbling. The characters bark out their full name (including middle initial), rank and assignment co-ordinates, top volume, at every opportunity.
It’s the chorus, the mantra, the repeating motif, of A Few Good Men, the tense, well-joisted 1989 court martial thriller by Aaron “West Wing” Sorkin that opens the Citadel season.
True, the stage play trails memories of its hit screen incarnation, which pitted a young Tom Cruise against the U.S. military establishment and notably Jack Nicholson; it actually got optioned as a movie before it ever opened on Broadway. But as seasoned theatre heavyweights like Shakespeare, say, or Aeschylus, have always known, along with TV screenwriters, the courtroom is a pure kind of theatre: clear conflict, secrecy vs. revelation, suspense — and at the end, a winner.
Judging by the Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production directed by James MacDonald, which whirls through staccato scenes on a stage revolve, A Few Good Men is slick, well-constructed, and shouty entertainment — but then, as my companion noted, the Marines are a shouty sort of operation.
As a piece of popular entertainment, it has the benefit of Sorkin’s facility with witty one-liners. As a 23-year-old piece of popular entertainment, its questions about the way the military world ticks have renewed resonance in the wake of 9/11, the pictures from Abu Ghraib, the Afghan PoWs, and the notoriety of Guantanamo.
The U.S. naval base in Cuba is where A Few Good Men unrolls. Two Marines (Jeff Strome, Cole Humeny, both excellent) stand accused of murdering a weakling stool-pigeon fellow Marine. And a young rookie lawyer Daniel Kaffee (Charlie Gallant), whose legal experience has been confined to pleabargaining between baseball games, has been assigned to defend them.
This is the military’s cagey response to interventionist provocations by the outsider Joanne, a thorny woman naval lawyer (Lora Brovold) who suspects the accused have been railroaded by the higher-ups. Were they executing an order, a Code Red?
The third member of their little band of, er, mixed-gender siblings up against the U.S. military establishment is Sam, a Jewish, Harvard-educated lawyer (Kevin Corey) who takes the skeptical, humanist, extra-military view, pace Nuremberg, that following orders does not, in the end, excuse morally reprehensible acts. It’s a reasonable view, fuelled by the skeptic’s habitual irony, but doesn’t quite have the impact you’d imagine.
The infrastructure: the traditional courtroom drama. The fabric: the ramrod Marine world, with its fanatical discipline and code of honour. The character arc: the growth of Daniel Kaffee.
The production doesn’t quite have its footing in Act I. Luckily, Gallant’s performance as the glib young lawyer who gains moral heft and drive in the course of events also grows, after an unconvincing start. The thinnish, rather forced posturing of Act I, with its carefully timed witticisms, means that the performance operates at some distance from the character; it’s a case of illustrating the character rather than really being him. Brovold’s Joanne has a seething grievance, suppressed exasperation and capacity for incredulity that makes her fierce throughout.
The most compelling, fully believable performance in MacDonald’s production — which raises the stakes and the suspense exponentially — comes from Paul Essiembre as the flinty and formidable Col. Jessep, the commander whose withering steely-eyed view of civilian hypocrisy — “You can’t handle the truth!” — could boil the fat off a Washington lawyer at 100 paces. When he thunders at his opponents, and us, that we enjoy “the luxury of the blind,” the guy is downright apocalyptic.
Along with Humeny and Strome, David Leyson as the prosecutor and Doug Mertz as a pivotal and troubled Marine also deliver, with poise, in the harsh world dramatically conjured by Michael Gianfrancesco’s box design — a cage, all searchlights and barbed wire, lit by Narda McCarroll.
Sorkin’s entertaining script moves us to want the underdogs to win, a classic setup.
And along the way, it offers some provocations to the things we think we know.
That’s why the final group image, with its anthem and heavy-handed irony about patriotism, seems superfluous. I think we’ve got the point.