Cast Outdoes Script In ‘Few Good Men’

“A Few Good Men,” Friday night, April 3, Spokane Civic Theatre

Sometimes, a play gets a better production than the material deserves. That’s the case with the Spokane Civic Theatre’s “A Few Good Men,” which boasts excellent direction, good acting and effective design, all for an Aaron Sorkin script that sounds more like a jokey B-level sitcom than a serious piece of theater.

Do you remember the movie version, starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore?

I’ll bet most people remember only one thing: Jack Nicholson snarling, “You can’t handle the truth.” The rest of the movie (and the play) is about as memorable as a very special episode of “Just Shoot Me - The Military Courtroom Episode.”

Try as I might, I could never warm up to this wisecracking courtroom drama about two Marines on trial for murder.

However, I could indeed warm up to the skilled work that director Melody Deatherage draws from this 19-person cast. She found more than a few good men for this cast.

This play requires 18, all of whom must be military in bearing and in attitude. Deatherage has assembled a platoon of them.

Among the standouts are Jhon Goodwin, who comes across as a zealously terrifying Lt. Kendrick. With his close-shaven sidewalls and his closed mind, he is a true American archetype, a man so steeped in Old Testament notions of justice that when two of his men kill another of his men during an extralegal “disciplinary action,” he calls it “God’s will.”

Kerry Patrick and Guy Thomas, as the two Marines accused of the murder, played their parts with a powerfully rigid Marine-like stoicism. When they talked about notions of “honor” and the “code” (unit, corps, God, country), they weren’t just spouting words. They believed them. Patrick’s character, in particular, was the living embodiment of the code.

Other excellent, well-nuanced performances came from Scott Cooper as Lt. j.g. Sam Weinberg and Thara Cooper as Lt. Cmdr. Joanne Galloway. Both of them had to strike an almost impossible balance between the jokey nature of the script and the serious nature of the plot, and both came through, against all odds. Jamie Flanery also succeeded in building a credible character, Lt. Jack Ross, in the midst of this often difficult-to-buy script.

The two lead actors, George Green as Lt. j.g. Daniel Kaffee and Mike Hynes as Lt. Col. Jessep, had the handicap of playing roles strongly identified with stars - Cruise and Nicholson. Green overcomes this problem by creating a far different character, a Harvard lawyer/Catskills comedian who owes more to David Spade than to Tom Cruise. This character, with his refusal to grow up or take his work seriously, was annoying throughout. But that’s no rap on Green. Sorkin wrote this character to be annoying. Boy, did he succeed.

Hynes does more of a Nicholson impression than I would have preferred. However, he is undeniably effective both in the early going, as an insufferably smug martinet, and at the end, as an unmasked conspirator.

For the entire play, and even before the opening curtain, Deatherage has a Marine sentry on duty at the back of the stage. This underscored one of the play’s themes - vigilance, and the pressures of sustaining it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Sorkin does try to bring up several big issues - loyalty, justice, the nature of honor - but they are presented histrionically, predictably and shallowly. I felt as if I were being manipulated, and not by an expert. In the end, Sorkin’s almost ridiculous need to write like Neil Simon undercuts every serious theme. Because it seems so much like a sitcom, dramatic tension simply vanishes.

“A Few Good Men” is ultimately just a little show for our amusement.