A Few Good Men by Aaron Sorkin. Directed by Claude A. Giroux, March 1-17. Wednesday to Saturday. For more information and showtime visit firstimpressionstheatre.com.
You know the line from the movie.
It’s the famous one involving a searing Jack Nicholson that often gets quoted. The American Film Institute lists it as the 29th best movie quote of all time. We’ll try not to repeat it here.
That’s because for theatre director Claude Giroux, First Impressions Theatre and his cast have worked tirelessly to make their stage production of A Few Good Men their own, largely divorced from the acclaimed film adaption from 1992.
“It’s impossible for us to try and be the movie, we don’t want to be the movie, we just think the play is a terrific play and we wanted to share it with this audience. It’s not a play that gets done very often because it’s quite a challenging play,” Giroux tells the North Shore News.
It shouldn’t be a far cry to separate film from play either, he says, explaining how famed screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin first wrote A Few Good Men for the stage in the late 1980s before later adapting it for the silver screen, a fact that’s not well known to most people.
“I knew it as a work for the stage first,” Giroux says. “I was a theatre student when it was on Broadway the first time, so I took notice of it pretty quickly. A lot of people did.”
The production, which is running at Deep Cove Shaw Theatre March 1-17, tells the tale of military lawyers who uncover a conspiracy leading up to the upper echelons of the U.S. government while defending two U.S. marines accused of murder.
“The way the play is written is very cinematic, even though it was a play before it was a movie, in that we’re cutting back and forth, to and from various scenes and locations and times,” Giroux says. “The scenes snap in and out very quickly.”
Giroux credits that with the Sorkin’s sharply written script that emphasizes tight, snappy and rapid-fire dialogue that constantly engages cast, crew and audience.
It’s a writing style that Sorkin perfected with television projects such as West Wing, where he was able to make the mundanity of big government bureaucracy and process seem exciting with fast paced, high energy dialogue as characters ducked through hallways, office spaces and a host of other drab locales.
“I mean, he invented that,” Giroux says.
First Impressions Theatre is mainly known for smaller scale productions and musicals, but Giroux says that trend is being broken with their rendition of A Few Good Men, which features a large 15-person cast.
When casting the production he says the essential skill set he was seeking was actors that were committed to learning the ins and out of embodying military personnel in a courtroom drama setting. And having someone who used to serve with the Canadian Forces in the cast has helped, Giroux says, pointing out actor Timothy Paul Coderre who’s playing the character of Capt. Matthew A. Markinson in the play.
“He was in the military for 27 years and so that was a very important piece of our puzzle in terms of understanding because he was able to take everybody and sho w them some of the basic requirements,” Giroux says. “We have a very believable looking cast.”
Earlier this week the males in the cast were given military haircuts courtesy of UBS Barbershop who travelled to Deep Cove in order to give the cast that authentic look and feel, an experience for the actors – some went in with long, flowing hair – that Giroux describes as being “pretty dramatic.”
With the suggestion of corruption echoing throughout the current U.S. administration in real life, Giroux sees his rendition of A Few Good Men dealing with some essential questions regarding the ends justifying the means.
“The question that this show asks that I think is so important is: What personal ethics are you willing to bend in order to protect your country?” he says.
The bending of one’s ethics in favour of a perceived greater good can sometimes be a messy affair but it’s also a reality of how they world seems to work these days, he says.
He describes a particularly noteworthy moment of the play occurring near the end of the production, where the two soldiers accused of murder are leaving the courtroom and share a brief, fleeting moment with their defence lawyer.
“I think it’s really special and I feel like it’s really representative of what a real marine is like,” Giroux says of the moment, wanting to share his enthusiasm for it without spoiling the ending.
That’s a truth we can likely all handle.
