Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✭✭✩
by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Ted Dykstra
Theatre Aquarius, Dofasco Centre, Hamilton
September 20-October 7, 2017
“Unit, Corps, God, Country”
Anyone interested in seeing a riveting mystery/thriller that ends as an explosive courtroom drama should head to Theatre Aquarius to see its sizzling production of A Few Good Men. Many people will know this play more from the Rob Reiner movie based on it in 1992 that was accorded four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. The play was written in 1989 by Aaron Sorkin, who is now better known as the writer of the screenplays to such movies as The American President (1995), The Social Network (2010), Moneyball (2011) and Steve Jobs (2015) and as the creator of such television series as The West Wing (1999-2006) and The Newsroom (2012-14). The play has all the incisiveness of Sorkin’s later work in exposing how hierarchies exist in a country where supposedly all men are equal and how power and authority can be misused. Because of the this, the play has a special resonance now that it would not have had for its original audience.
The story concerns a mishap at the American Guantanamo Bay Naval base in Cuba, long before that site became a detention area for suspected terrorists. Two Marines, Private First Class Louden Downey (Benjamin Sutherland) and Lance Corporal Harold Dawson (Lovell Adams-Gray) have been arrested for assaulting and killing a fellow Marine of their unit, PFC William Santiago. The official story is that Santiago reported to the Naval Investigative Service that someone had illegally fired his gun at a guard on the Cuban side of the island. Santiago wrote letters to everyone including the Department of Defense requesting a transfer to another base in return for his information because he feared for his life. In the military hierarchy Santiago in writing such letters was guilty of breaking the chain of command. According to base commander Col. Nathan R. Jessup (Oliver Becker), his executive officer, Lt. Col. Matthew Markinson (Ralph Small) and Santiago's commanding officer, Lt. Jonathan Kendrick (David Christo), Dawson and Downey murdered Santiago for bringing their unit into disrepute.
All seems cut and dried except that Naval investigator and lawyer Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway (Ruby Joy) suspects that there is a cover-up. She believes that Dawson and Downey were carrying out a “Code Red”, an unofficial act of discipline, now illegal, to punish Santiago for his behaviour. She wants to know whether the private’s death was intentional as the base commander claims or accidental and, in either case, who ordered the “Code Red”.
When she is not assigned to the case, her suspicions are only heightened, especially when it is given to Lieutenant Junior Grade Daniel Kaffee (Mike Shara), a U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps lawyer who has never seen the inside of a courtroom because his sole approach to his cases is arranging plea bargains. And, indeed, that is exactly what he is expected to do here.
To make Kaffee properly investigate the case, Galloway manages to get herself appointed as Downey’s lawyer and, with Kaffee’s friend and legal researcher Sam Weinberg (Amos Crawley), the three fly down to Guantanamo to conduct interviews. Once there, it becomes clear that the accused are so rigorous in their devotion to discipline that it is hard to imagine they would plot or carry out a murder for personal reasons. The mantra drilled into them is “Unit, Corps, God, Country”, so would they commit murder simply to follow orders?
Interviews with the three top-ranking men on base expose contradictions and only confirm Galloway’s notion of a cover-up. Two main questions emerge. First, what will finally convince Kaffee not to take the easy way out of this case and to bring it to trial? And second, if it is brought to trial, how can Kaffee possibly win when his superiors are so intent on his failure? What makes Sorkin’s play so good as a mystery is that unlike Agatha Christie, the solution does not depend on withheld information. Sorkin gives us everything we need to know in Act 1 so that the solution to the problem is not a surprise but a connecting of facts we already have.
There is no weak link in the 18-member cast and Ted Dykstra directs the complex action with clarity and insight. I have never seen the 1992 film, but I can say that having seen the play acted at so high a level on stage, I now have no desire at all to see the film. Dykstra’s pacing of the action and his deft choreography of the large cast’s movements are impeccable.
Mike Shara’s character Daniel Kaffee comes to be be the central character of the play and Shara is ideal for the role. Shara shows how, under the influence of Galloway and his own observation of the facts, Kaffee gradually gives up his his easy-going ways as a plea-bargainer and comes to accept that he has some duty to uncover the truth even if it harms his career. Shara makes this transition completely believable and demonstrates that once Kaffee unlocks the mental compartment where he had stowed his ethics, his search for the truth becomes a passion.
As Galloway, Ruby Joy creates a sympathetic portrait of a bright woman who, because of military protocols in the male-dominated US armed forces, has to walk a fine line between speaking out when she has to and keeping quiet about the negative behaviour she sees around her. Joy is expert at showing how Galloway is in a constant state of self-control as she tamps down her seething anger at being patronized, ignored or outright lied to by the men around her. Joy and Shara played opposite each other as Berowne and the Princess of France in Love’s Labours Lost at Stratford in 2015. They still have a great onstage chemistry and we enjoy judging the status of disdain versus admiration that Kaffee and Galloway show each other in the course of the action.
Oliver Becker plays Nathan Jessep as coarse and immediately unlikeable but, like Kaffee and Galloway, we have to realize that unlikeability is not proof of criminality. Our view of Becker’s character becomes more complex as the play progresses because Becker presents Jessep’s view so forcefully that he did nothing wrong, and we come to see that there may be true in his harsh way of looking at the world.
The play is peppered with fine performances in smaller roles. As the accused, Benjamin Sutherland as Louden Downey and Lovell Adams-Gray as Harold Dawson are excellent at showing the battle within them of their pride at conforming to duty and their shame at being falsely accused of a crime, a situation that they cannot comprehend. Frequently Sutherland and Adams-Gray show emotion breaking through on their faces even as they rigidly conform to the extremely formal military rules of how inferiors are allowed to address superiors.
As Jonathan Kendrick, David Christo makes the lieutenant seem almost more dangerous than Jessep. As a fundamentalist Christian Kendrick has no qualms about conflating military and Christian rules of behaviour, Kendrick’s God being the vengeful God of the Old Testament rather than the loving God of the New. The opposite of Kendrick is the Matthew Markinson of Ralph Small, who has a conscience but is as ineffectual as Kendrick is forceful, a failing Markinson atones for in the course of the action.
In other roles Walter Borden is exactly the kind of learned, impartial judge we wish would preside at all trials. It is a pleasure to watch how Borden’s judge begins the trial as if it were just a routine affair but gradually comes to see that more is involved than the court-martial of two young men. As Sam Weinberg, Amos Crawley acts as a reliable sounding board for both Galloway and Kaffee. Matthew MacFadzean plays the prosecuting attorney Lt. Jack Ross not as a villain as in so many court room dramas, but as lawyer and friend of Kaffee who is simply doing his job.
One might think that a play from 1989 about murder at a naval base would have little to say to an audience today. In fact, just the reverse is true. The play is about the use and abuse of power and how those with the most power can feel immune from the ethical guidelines they enforce on those below them. The casual misogyny that Galloway experiences, sadly, seems not to have vanished but to have only become stronger. In these ways the play has strangely become even more relevant 28 years later. A Few Good Men is an impressive start to Theatre Aquarius’ 45th season.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) David Christo, Oliver Becker, Ralph Small, Ruby Joy, Mike Shara and Amos Crawley; Ruby Joy, Benjamin Sutherland, Lovell Adams-Gray and Mike Shara; cast of A Few Good Men. ©2017 Theatre Aquarius.
For tickets, visit https://theatreaquarius.org.
2017-09-26
A Few Good Men