You Can’t Handle the Truth! The Story Behind Broadway’s A Few Good Men

Since its Broadway debut in 1989, the fast-paced courtroom drama A Few Good Men has been in constant rotation at theaters around the world. Centering on the trial of two Marines accused of murder at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba, the play and its starry 1992 film adaptation launched the writing career of Aaron Sorkin, who was just 28 on opening night. Almost four decades later, A Few Good Men is getting a new production at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, directed by three-time Tony winner Michael Arden. Here’s a look back—and forward—at a play that combines suspense, humor and surprisingly timely themes.

The Write Stuff
Before winning five Emmys for his work on The West Wing and an Oscar for writing The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin was an unemployed actor and bartender at Broadway’s Palace Theatre. The stagestruck younger son in a family of lawyers in suburban Scarsdale, New York, he entered adulthood with a deeply held feeling of inferiority. “I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up,” he said in a 2001 New York Times Magazine profile. “I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.”

After earning a degree in theater from Syracuse University, Sorkin bounced around New York doing odd jobs and writing short plays until his sister, a military lawyer, shared the story of a hazing death at Guantanamo Bay. Behind the bar at the Palace Theatre, he used cocktail napkins to jot ideas and scenes that would turn into A Few Good Men. Optioned by David Brown, producer of Jaws, The Sting and other hits, the play had a pre-Broadway presentation at the University of Virginia before opening at the Music Box Theatre on November 15, 1989, directed by Don Scardino.

“What’s a Code Red?”
Tom Hulce received above-the-title billing in A Few Good Men for playing cocky Navy lawyer Daniel Kaffee, assigned to defend the young Marines responsible for the death of a weaker member of their platoon in the summer of 1986. Kaffee arranged 44 plea bargains in his first year on the job—“one more and I get a set of steak knives,” he quips—and it’s expected he will dispatch this potentially embarrassing incident with little fanfare. But, not so fast: Earnest internal affairs investigator Joanne Galloway believes the young Marine died in a botched “Code Red,” an illegal disciplinary hazing. Rounding out the play’s trio of protagonists is Lt. Col. Nathan Jessep, the intimidating, misogynist commanding officer at Guantanamo Bay, who has an unwavering belief in his own moral superiority.

Broadway audiences immediately embraced the snappy dialogue and smartly paced confrontation scenes involving Hulce (who received the play’s only 1990 Tony nomination), Megan Gallagher as Galloway and Stephen Lang as Jessep. New York Times critic Frank Rich was less enthusiastic, praising the acting but calling the play “too predictable to satisfy as courtroom entertainment” and “lightweight” in its attempt to address morality in the military. (Rich’s swipe at the “talky” script came years before Sorkin became famous for writing “walk and talk” scenes in which characters spar verbally while moving from place to place.) Nevertheless, A Few Good Men became a hit, running for 497 performances.

The Reiner Touch
From the moment he optioned the script, Brown envisioned a big-screen version of A Few Good Men. In a change of pace from his ’80s comedy hits such as This Is Spinal Tap and When Harry Met Sally, Rob Reiner agreed to direct the movie. He and Sorkin spent more than six months working on the screenplay, with input from veteran screenwriter William Goldman. At one point Sorkin and Reiner “sat for five or six weeks and went through the script page by page,” Sorkin told Charlie Rose in a 1993 interview. “He was relentless about detail; he is a great writer’s director.”

Reiner concluded that star power would be key to the film’s success. Accordingly, he paid $12.5 million out of a $40 million budget to Tom Cruise as Kaffee and $2- to $3 million to Demi Moore as Galloway. Jack Nicholson received $5 million for 10 days of shooting as Jessep, later boasting that his salary was “money well spent.” Nicholson’s delivery of the signature line “You can’t handle the truth!” lives on in memes. Also in the cast were Kevin Bacon as the prosecuting attorney, Keifer Sutherland as a scary Marine lieutenant, J.T. Walsh as a sympathetic captain and Noah Wyle as a naive corporal. A decade before Hairspray, Marc Shaiman composed the score, one of his 20 film collaborations with Reiner. Released in December 1992, A Few Good Men grossed more than $141 million and was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture and Nicholson’s performance as Best Supporting Actor.

Stage & Screen
The success of A Few Good Men catapulted Sorkin to the Hollywood A-list, allowing him to jump from movies to TV and back, with occasional forays into the theater. His favorite subjects include technology (The Social Network; Steve Jobs; the upcoming The Social Reckoning), journalism (Sports Night; The Newsroom) and politics (The American President; The Trial of the Chicago 7; and, of course, the hugely influential series The West Wing). “I write idealistically and romantically,” he explained in a recent The New York Times interview. “I find that these areas—government, the news, journalists—are where the stories are that really suit the way I like to write.”

While juggling multiple film projects, Sorkin returned to Broadway three times. In 2007, he explored the origins of television in The Farnsworth Invention, starring Jimmi Simpson and Hank Azaria, which received mixed reviews and ran for four months. In 2018, he penned a smash-hit adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Newsroom leading man Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch, with Celia Keenan-Bolger in a Tony-winning performance as Scout. Although the play received eight other Tony nominations, Sorkin was notably snubbed in the Best Play category. The run was interrupted by the COVID pandemic, but returned briefly in late 2021 with Greg Kinnear as Atticus. In 2023, Sorkin accepted the thankless challenge of writing a new book for the classic musical Camelot, directed by his Mockingbird collaborator Bartlett Sher at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. Critics were mostly unimpressed, and the revival closed after 116 performances.

Hey, Old Friend
Over the past 35 years, Sorkin declined several opportunities to revive A Few Good Men on Broadway. But when Lincoln Center Theater came calling, the answer was yes. In addition to his fondness for the Beaumont, “one of my favorite theaters in the world,” he ticked off his reasons in an interview with Broadway.com: “Michael Arden, who’s a magnificent director we’ve all seen just over the last five or six years; a chance to work with Brad [Whitford] again; the sudden relevance of the play—the idea of illegal orders is back in the news; but it also gave me a chance, frankly, to polish the play. I’ve told everyone here, ‘Treat this like a new play. If something isn’t working in previews and rehearsals, let me go back to the hotel and rewrite it.’”

The presence of “Brad,” one of Sorkin’s most enduring collaborators, promises an exciting new spin on the character of Jessep. (Fans of The Handmaid’s Tale have seen how quietly terrifying he can be.) Whitford knows the material well, having played the prosecutor Jack Ross toward the end of the original Broadway run before pivoting to Kaffee, eventually becoming the longest-running actor in the lead role. He went on to play White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman, the character reportedly closest to Sorkin’s own personality, in six seasons of The West Wing, winning the first of his three Emmy Awards.

“It’s impossible for me to articulate the gratitude I have for Aaron,” Whitford told Broadway.com as Sorkin looked on with a smile. “One of the joys of this play is Aaron’s writing works on every level. There’s a lot of humor, humongous stakes. It’s about something terribly relevant at this particular moment, and it’s very generous storytelling for the audience. They’ll have a good time.”

With a revival cast that includes Tom Blyth as Kaffee and Krysta Rodriguez as Galloway, A Few Good Men is set to entertain a new generation of Broadway theatergoers, with “breathtaking” sets and lighting design, according to Sorkin. The story “was always meant to be a theatrical experience,” he stressed to Broadway.com. “I love courtroom dramas, and I love doing things in a theater that you can only do in a theater. You’re going to want to see the show because this cast is going to blow the doors off the place.”

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