Can You Handle The Truth? RL Showcases “A Few Good Men”

On November 22 and 23, Roxbury Latin staged the year’s Senior Play—Aaron Sorkin’s drama A Few Good Men. In the play, two U.S. Marines are facing a court-martial, accused of murdering a fellow Marine at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. While it is believed that his death was retribution for him naming another Marine in a fence line shooting, Naval investigator and lawyer Lt. Cmdr. JoAnne Galloway suspects the two carried out a “Code Red” order: a violent extrajudicial punishment. While Galloway wants to defend them, the case is given to the inexperienced and lazy Lt. Daniel Kaffee. The case goes to court, and what unfolds—in and out of the courtroom—is emblematic of the tight narrative pacing and rapid-fire dialogue that viewers have come to expect from writer Aaron Sorkin.

Known for the Emmy-winning television series that he created, wrote, and produced—The West Wing, Studio 60, The Newsroom—Sorkin has been a prolific force in American film and television over several decades. While many people are familiar with the 1992 film adaptation of A Few Good Men—starring Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, and Demi Moore—the work was a play before it was a screenplay! Roxbury Latin boys—along with Winsor student Katie Burstein, who played Lt. Commander Joanne Galloway in the production—successfully brought to life the tension, complexity, and humanity of Sorkin’s writing on the Smith Theater stage this fall.

In a recent Tripod article, senior Jonathan Weiss explored faculty member and director Derek Nelson’s decision to stage A Few Good Men this fall:

When Mr. Nelson searched for this year’s Senior Play, he had the school’s 375th anniversary in mind. His first instinct was to find a play written literally in the 17th century… but A Few Good Men ties in with the 375th in a profound way. It deals with history, with education, and with core Roxbury Latin themes like honesty and loyalty.

A Few Good Men is brilliantly written: “Aaron Sorkin is a master of both overarching plot structure and scenes,” says Mr. Nelson. “He manages to push just the right buttons to get the audience on the edge of their seats.” Dauntingly, excitingly, the play moves fast: “The challenge is there’s a lot of language, and you’ve gotta make those scenes pop.”

Best of all, A Few Good Men is delightfully out-of-the-box. Seldom does a mainstream movie… grace the RL stage. Mr. Nelson would stress, though, that the intention was not to recreate the movie, but rather to bring to stage the original Broadway play. As director, he did not aim to “match the tone, or interplay between characters, or even the readings of the lines in the way that they were directed in the film.” At the same time, he did not command the cast not to imitate the movie. His goal? “I want the actors to find themselves in Colonel Jessup, in the judge, and so on.”

View production photos, by Mike Pojman.

Cast List

Lance Cpl. Harold Dawson………………Esteban Tarazona

Pfc. Louden Downey………………………Frankie Gutierrez

Lt. J.G. Sam Weinberg……………………David Sullivan

Lt. J,G Daniel Kaffee………………………Ben Crawford

Lt. Cmdr. Joanne Galloway……………….Katie Burstein     

Capt. Isaac Whitaker………………………Will Specht     

Capt. Matthew Markinson…………………Austin Manning   

Pfc. William T. Santiago……………………Teddy Glaeser     

Lt. Jack Ross………………………………..Alejandro Denis   

Lt. Col. Nathan Jessep……………………..Frankie Lonergan    

Lt. Jonathan James Kendrick………………Jake Carroll   

Judge Capt. Julius A. Randolph……..…….Jonathan Weiss       

Cmdr. Walter Stone, MD……………………Edozie Umunna  

Cpl Tom Sturgess……………………………Nick Raciti  

Cpl Jeffrey Owen Howard/MP………………A.J. Gutierrez  

Naval Brig MP, Washington……………..…..Colson Ganthier  

Orderly Admin., Andrews Air Force/MP……Eli Bailit  

Lance Cpl Hammaker/MP……………………Oliver Wyner  

Lance Cpl Dunn/MP………………………….Daniel Sun-Friedman  

Sergeant-At-Arms/MP………………………..John Wilkinson