A Few Good Men

Written between cues at the Palace

The play began with a telephone call. Aaron Sorkin's sister Deborah, a Boston University Law School graduate who had joined the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps, had been assigned to defend Marines involved in a hazing incident at the Guantánamo Bay naval base. Sorkin took the outline of that case and turned it into a court-martial drama about two Marines charged with killing a fellow serviceman on a night-time disciplinary order.

He was not, at the time, a working playwright. Sorkin was tending bar at the Palace Theatre on Broadway and wrote much of the story on cocktail napkins during the first act of La Cage aux Folles. The structure that came out of it — interrogation scenes cut hard against a trial, with the evidence arriving through cross-examination rather than narration — is the thing that has kept the script in production for nearly four decades.

497 performances, then a film that took it over

The play opened at the Heritage Repertory Theatre at the University of Virginia on 19 September 1989, transferred to the Kennedy Center in Washington, and reached Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on 15 November 1989 in a staging by Don Scardino. Tom Hulce played Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, Megan Gallagher played Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway and Stephen Lang played Colonel Nathan Jessep. It ran 497 performances, with Michael O'Hare and Ron Perlman among those who later took over Jessep.

Hulce was nominated for Best Actor at the 44th Tony Awards and Gallagher won a Theatre World Award in 1990. Then came the 1992 film, adapted by Sorkin himself, which fixed the material in public memory as a screen property with a shouted witness-box climax. For most of the audiences buying tickets in 2026, the film is the original and the play is the adaptation — a reversal the current production has to work around rather than against.

Stage revivals continued in the interim without returning to Broadway. The most prominent was a West End production at the Theatre Royal Haymarket that began in September 2005 and ran about three months, with Rob Lowe as Kaffee, Suranne Jones as Galloway and John Barrowman as Jack Ross.

Whitford, from the prosecution table to the witness box

Bradley Whitford was in the original Broadway company. He played the prosecutor Jack Ross, understudied Kaffee, and took over the lead, becoming the production's longest-serving Kaffee. Casting him in 1989 began the working relationship that eventually produced The West Wing: Sorkin has said he offered Whitford everything he wrote from that point on, having decided, as he put it, that this was an actor he wanted to work with for the rest of his life. Whitford, recalling the first read, said he remembered feeling comfortable in the writing and that it was impossible for an actor to express how much that meant.

Thirty-seven years on he is playing Jessep, the Marine colonel whose testimony the whole play is built to extract. The symmetry has been the production's main talking point in the trade press through September and October 2026, and it gives the revival a line of continuity back to the Music Box that a straightforward recasting would not have.

The Beaumont production

This is the first Broadway revival of the play. Lincoln Center Theater is presenting it at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, with previews from 8 October 2026, an official opening on 29 October and a closing performance on 10 January 2027 — a 13-week limited engagement. Tickets went on sale on 21 July 2026.

Michael Arden directs, following Tony-winning work on Parade and Maybe Happy Ending. Tom Blyth makes his Broadway debut as Kaffee and Krysta Rodriguez plays Galloway. The rest of the company includes Michael Oberholtzer as Ross, Stephanie Berry as Captain Randolph, Nick Blaemire as Weinberg, Lavel Schley as Lance Corporal Dawson, Collin Kelly-Sordelet as Private Downey, Thom Sesma as Major Markinson, Daniel Velez as Private Santiago, John Zdrojeski as Lieutenant Kendrick, Billy Eugene Jones as Captain Whitaker, Michael Braugher as Corporal Howard and Christopher Gurr as Commander Stone. Twenty-six performers are on the Beaumont payroll, which is a large company for a straight play and is used as one: the chorus of uniformed personnel is a staging device, not decoration.

The design team is Dane Laffrey (sets), Alejo Vietti (costumes), Japhy Weideman (lighting), Joshua D. Reid (sound) and Gabriel Mann (original music), with Cookie Jordan on hair and wigs, Kirk Cambridge-Del Pesche on make-up, Ricky Ubeda directing movement and Rick Sordelet and Christian Kelly-Sordelet on fights. Arden has said he wanted to give the play a scale matching the institution it depicts, and promised something unforgettable to look at.

On relevance, Sorkin's pitch in a production video released on 12 October 2026 was blunt: half the cast had not been born when the play was first staged, and the specific points of contact now are illegal orders, toxic masculinity and the perversion of religion. Arden's framing in the same piece was that the company had treated the script as a new play rather than a period reconstruction — that it does not feel like an examination of 1989.

Standing right now: previews, no verdict yet

The critics have not filed. Press night is 29 October 2026, so everything on the record as of mid-October comes from paying audiences at previews, and it is split. A post on 9 October called the evening well produced, singled out the lighting and settled on a solid B. Another, on 14 October, left at the interval, describing the production as toothless and musical-theatre-ified and the direction as listless. Rodriguez's Galloway has drawn the most argument, with more than one preview attendee questioning the fit between a musical-theatre background and the play's flat, procedural register.

The most consistent complaint is not about acting at all. The Beaumont's thrust stage has produced repeated sightline warnings from preview audiences — advice to sit centre or close to it, and one ticket-platform review flatly calling the sightlines horrible. Buyers choosing side seats at the Beaumont for a play that turns on faces in a witness box should factor that in. Audience reports also note the familiar problem of a film-literate house: one attendee who knew the picture well found it hard to watch the plot unfold without anticipating it, while a companion who had never seen the film enjoyed the evening more.