Don't tell it to the Marines.
There's a lot of plot, maybe too much, in "A Few Good Men," an overstuffed and not entirely convincing military courtroom drama that opened Wednesday at Broadway's Music Box Theatre.Playwright Aaron Sorkin has packed more than 60 complex scenes and 20 actors into his nearly three-hour examination of what happened to a young Marine at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Some of the evening is entertaining, thanks to the author's snappy, often funny dialogue. The jokes help camouflage the play's dramatic shortcomings, particularly its meager attempts to flesh out the personal life of the main character and a confusing, disappointing courtroom finale. But the laughs also get in the way and trivialize the serious story.
The play marks the Broadway debut of the 28-year-old Sorkin and of director Don Scardino, who has made a name for himself as an actor and as a director of television's "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd."
Its hero is a wisecracking Navy lawyer named Daniel Kaffee, played with a great deal of charm and humor by Tom Hulce. Kaffee is assigned to defend two Marines charged with murdering a third soldier. The dead Marine, Pfc. William Santiago, was disliked for being a malingerer, trying to get out of the Corps and writing letters of complaint to his senator.
Santiago was the victim of a "Code Red," a Marine term for a brutal form of hazing. The two men on trial for his death are willing to take the punishment for what happened. But Kaffee, with the help of two other defense lawyers, played by Megan Gallagher and Mark Nelson, are determined to prove a coverup.
They run up against the abrasive, super-macho Guantanamo Marine commander, Lt. Col. Nathan Jessep, played by a grinning Stephen Lang. Lang gives a maniacal, over-the-top performance that gets more cartoonish as the evening goes on.
Hulce gets uneven support from the other cast members. A sad-faced Mark Nelson brings intelligence and a sly sense of fun to the role of Hulce's nebbish assistant, while a bland Gallagher has the impossible task of playing his other, more gung-ho partner. Both of the roles only pad the plot.
Someone should have sent Sorkin back to cut the play. The wait for the minimal dramatic payoff is long, and even when it comes, several issues - particularly the death of Santiago - remain unresolved.
"A Few Good Men" already has been sold to the movies (Tom Cruise is reportedly interested). Maybe by the time it begins filming, Sorkin will have streamlined the play. But what's on stage now at the Music Box looks and sounds like a long night of one playwright's basic training.