A Few Good Men (play)

A Few Good Men is a play by Aaron Sorkin, first produced on Broadway by David Brown in 1989. It tells the story of military lawyers at a court-martial who uncover a high-level conspiracy in the course of defending their clients, two United States Marines accused of murder.

It opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre in Manhattan of New York City on November 15, 1989, in a production directed by Don Scardino, with Tom Hulce as Lieutenant (junior grade) Daniel Kaffee, Megan Gallagher as Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway, and Stephen Lang as Colonel Jessep. Michael O'Hare replaced Lang as Col. Jessep later in the run.

Sorkin adapted his work three years later into a screenplay for the 1992 feature film of the same name.

Plot

Private William Santiago, a United States Marine at the United States Navy's Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, on the south shore of the island of Cuba is a weak Marine who has a hard time physically keeping up and gets along poorly with his fellow Marines and has gone outside the chain of command to the Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) to request a transfer. Although Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Markinson requests that Santiago be transferred, his senior Base Commander Colonel Nathan Jessep instructs Lieutenant Jonathan James Kendrick, Private Santiago's platoon commander, to "train" Santiago. Soon afterward, Santiago dies. He was murdered, and the two Marines Lance Corporal Harold Dawson and Private First Class Louden Downey who broke into Santiago's dorm room and attacked him and stuffed a rag into his mouth / throat, will stand trial.