NEW YORK — “You can’t handle the truth,” writer Aaron’s Sorkin’s most famous line, was a harmonic refrain inside the busy men’s room during intermission at the Lincoln Center on Wednesday night. This was notable because it is spoken only when Colonel Nathan R. Jessep finally explodes in self-immolating moral righteousness in Act 2 of “A Few Good Men.” But the lively crew at the urinals was already licking its lips in anticipation.
The bon mot was spoken by Jack Nicholson, of course, in the loyal Rob Reiner film of Sorkin’s 1989 Broadway drama. Its quoting is generally accompanied by a Nicholson impression of dubious quality, which is both a curse and an opportunity for director Michael Arden’s expansive new production and its current star, Bradley Whitford. The truth, and its handling, hangs over the show, which must be annoying for those involved, and simultaneously is why many people bought tickets. A Faustian bargain, perhaps.
But the character of Jessep, the commanding officer at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, is not actually the lead role in the show. That would be his chief antagonist, United States Navy JAG Corps lieutenant (junior grade) Daniel Kaffee, a fresh-faced kid who has seen his naval service as merely a way to pay for law school but who, as he investigates a potential murder case over the course of the play, comes to embody the righteous half of this play’s big moral dilemma: Whether or not hard-bitten, rule-breaking pit bulls like Jessep are needed to protect America’s soft core, as embodied by Kaffee (Tom Blyth) and his two navy lawyer sidekicks, Joanne Galloway (Krysta Rodriguez) and Sam Weinberg (Nick Blaemire).
No doubt the Lincoln Center crew saw fresh Jessep resonance in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s so-called Department of War, and fair enough, but Sorkin structured his play and subsequent screenplay to create more of a Hannibal Lecter-like villain than a guy with a real case to make. Thus, having seen many productions of this play over the years, the reality is that while Jessep is there to scare the audience, this is absolutely Kaffee’s play, and the central problem with this production is that the miscast Blyth does not reveal the necessary Simba-like transformation from hakuna matata to Pride Rock.
You believe him when it comes to where his character begins, but he hasn’t figured out when and how, in Sorkin’s dramatic action, to earn his military keep, even though the play gives him lots of hints.
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The other problem with Blyth’s performance here is that it is vocally muddy, which tends to be the kiss of death in Sorkinland, given the hyper levels of articulation of all and sundry. Even the famous line so richly anticipated in the men’s room, and so enthusiastically delivered by Whitford, gets trodden on, mostly because Blyth has yet to figure out the rhythms of this distinctive writer.
No one else in this otherwise stellar cast has this problem. Whitford is a live wire, as one would expect from him, and brings to the role a new kind of charm, which functions to explain how Jessep has survived until now. Bulked up yet nuanced and verbose, Whitford does as much to humanize his guy as the script allows and the result is a potent but nonetheless dignified central performance. Rodriguez is very much present and likable, too, even if her character, the woman who figured all this out first, basically has to stand aside and let the guy she had to convince take all the credit. It is one of several things about this play that now would get more scrutiny than was the case in the 1980s.
That said, “A Few Good Men” is a bona fide audience pleaser, a craftful and engrossing piece of writing, even if this very expansive staging with four additional actors from what is typical (the gifted designer Dane Laffrey has re-created much of the Navy base, it feels) pushes it to its limit. Arden, of course, is a director who knows both how to create potent visual pictures and how to forge kinetic movement within them. That’s very much on display here, especially when uniformed men rise from where we are accustomed to seeing the orchestra pit, like Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s terra cotta army come to life.
Christopher Gurr, Thom Sesma and Billy Eugene Jones all build enigmatic, authentically military characters (much attention was paid to veracity here), but the two most potent performances of the night come from Lavel Schley and Collin Kelly-Sordelet, who play the two rank-and-file marines caught up in Jessep’s power struggles.
Truth be told, though, the main struggle here has to be within Kaffee and that really is not visible at all.
At the Vivian Beaumont Theater in the Lincoln Center for the Arts, 150 W. 65th St., New York; www.lct.org
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic