A Few Good Men

A Few Good Men is Aaron Sorkin's courtroom drama about a military murder case. After a Marine at Guantanamo Bay dies following a night attack in his barracks, two men from his own platoon are charged with killing him. Their defense goes to a Navy lawyer who settles cases rather than trying them, and the case forces him to face a question that runs through the whole play: when an order comes down the chain of command, who answers for what happens next?

The revival brings the play back to Broadway for the first time since the original 1989 staging. That first run marked Sorkin's debut as a Broadway playwright and made his name as a writer. He later adapted the story himself for the 1992 film starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore, so the characters may already be familiar from the screen.

Lincoln Center Theater presents the revival at the Vivian Beaumont Theater as a 13-week limited engagement and the first production of its 2026–27 season, with Michael Arden directing. As of October 2026, the cast is led by Tom Blyth as Daniel Kaffee, Krysta Rodriguez as Joanne Galloway and Bradley Whitford as Nathan R. Jessep.

The play takes place in the summer of 1986. Its scenes move between the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Washington Navy Yard, where the court-martial is held.

At Guantanamo, William Santiago is a Marine who cannot keep up with the physical demands of his unit. He has also gone over his superiors' heads with a request to be moved away from Guantanamo. One night two Marines from his platoon, Harold W. Dawson and Louden Downey, come into his room and attack him. Santiago dies, and the two are charged with murder.

The case lands on the desk of Daniel Kaffee, a junior lawyer in the Navy's JAG Corps who resolves his cases with plea bargains and has never argued one in court. Joanne Galloway, a more senior JAG officer, believes there is more to it. She suspects the attack was a code red, an unofficial and violent punishment of the kind regulations forbid, and that someone above the two accused ordered it. She keeps pressing Kaffee to fight rather than settle. Sam Weinberg joins them as Kaffee's co-counsel.

Kaffee and Galloway travel to Guantanamo to question the base commander, Nathan R. Jessep, who tells them Santiago had been scheduled to leave the base on a flight the next morning. The prosecutor, Jack Ross, offers a plea deal, but Dawson and Downey turn it down. They insist the order came from their platoon commander, Jonathan Kendrick, and that Santiago's death was never their intent.

Kaffee had expected to close the file quickly. Instead he enters pleas of not guilty and heads to trial. Matthew Markinson, an officer on Jessep's staff, quietly lets him know that the official version of events is not the whole story. From there the drama turns on one problem: how can the defense prove that the order really came from above, and how much is Kaffee willing to risk to try?

The idea came from a phone call. Sorkin's sister Deborah, a lawyer in the Navy's JAG Corps, told him she was heading for Guantanamo Bay to represent Marines accused of nearly killing another Marine in a hazing that a superior had ordered. The real case behind that call dates from 1986. The Marine who was attacked was badly hurt but survived. Seven of the Marines involved took plea deals, and three went to trial. Sorkin changed the details for the stage, and he has said that Kaffee is entirely made up rather than drawn from any one person. The title borrows a Marine Corps recruiting slogan.

While he was writing the first draft, Sorkin was tending bar at the Palace Theatre on Broadway, then home to La Cage aux Folles. Much of that draft took shape on cocktail napkins during his shifts, and he typed it up later at home.

On the page, the play is built like a legal procedural: interviews, a deal on the table, a refusal, and then the work of building a defense in a military courtroom. Rank is never far from the surface. The defense lawyers are Navy officers, and Jessep, the Marine officer who commands the base, outranks all three of them.

For this revival, Sorkin went back into the script and polished the dialogue, while leaving the plot and the characters as they were. He has said that he turned down earlier offers to revive the play on Broadway until he had a chance to revise it, and that he wanted this production treated as a new play.

This is a play rather than a musical, so there are no songs. Because the whole case grows out of a violent night in a barracks, the physical side of the show has its own specialists, with a movement director and two fight directors on the team.

As of October 2026, Tom Blyth plays Daniel Kaffee in his Broadway debut. His screen credits include The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, in which he played Coriolanus Snow, the series Billy the Kid and People We Meet on Vacation. Krysta Rodriguez, whose Broadway credits include The Addams Family and a turn as Roxie Hart in Chicago, plays Joanne Galloway. Bradley Whitford, an Emmy Award winner known for The Handmaid's Tale as well as The West Wing, plays Nathan R. Jessep.

As of October 2026, the rest of the principal company includes Michael Oberholtzer as Jack Ross, Nick Blaemire as Sam Weinberg, Thom Sesma as Matthew Markinson and John Zdrojeski as Jonathan Kendrick. Lavel Schley, also making his Broadway debut, plays Harold W. Dawson, with Collin Kelly-Sordelet as Louden Downey and Daniel Velez as William T. Santiago. Billy Eugene Jones plays Isaac Whitaker, and Stephanie Berry plays the military judge, J. A. Randolph. Christopher Gurr is the Navy doctor Walter Stone, and Michael Braugher plays Jeffrey Howard. Shunté Lofton makes her Broadway debut as the Orderly. Six ensemble members round out the company.

The world premiere took place in Charlottesville on September 19, 1989, at the University of Virginia's Heritage Repertory Theatre. After that short tryout the play moved to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., in October 1989, and it opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on November 15, 1989.

The road to Broadway began with a film deal. Sorkin sold the screen rights to the producer David Brown on one condition: Brown also had to produce the play on stage. Don Scardino directed the original production, Ben Edwards designed it and John Gromada wrote its music. Tom Hulce played Kaffee, Megan Gallagher played Galloway and Stephen Lang played Jessep, with Clark Gregg as Ross and Robert Hogan as Markinson. The run lasted 497 performances, a little more than a year.

Several actors stepped into principal roles over that run. Michael O'Hare, Perry King and Ron Perlman each took over as Jessep, and Timothy Busfield played Ross. Bradley Whitford made his Broadway debut in the production in 1990, first as Ross and a few months later as Kaffee. A national tour followed, with Michael O'Keefe as Kaffee, and it ran through 1992.

Rob Reiner directed the film version, which Columbia Pictures brought to movie theaters in December 1992. The play has also traveled well beyond Broadway. Swadesh Deepak wrote a Hindi stage adaptation, Court Martial, in 1991; a German-language version, Eine Frage der Ehre, opened at the Volkstheater in Vienna in January 1993; and in 2005 London saw a revival at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, directed by David Esbjornson, with Rob Lowe as Kaffee. In 2016 NBC announced a live television version with Alec Baldwin as Jessep, but it never received an airdate.

This revival began previews at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on October 8, 2026, with the official opening set for October 29, 2026.