Marine Corpse

Since I'm about to deal with a murder mystery/courtoom drama -- Aaron Sorkin's 1989 Broadway hit, A Few Good Men, which is now enjoying a satisfying production at the Caldwell Theatre Company -- allow me to play Sherlock Holmes for a moment and hypothesize how this particular work came into being. Trust me, ladies and gentlemen of the readers' court, my line of logic will go a long way toward explaining my feelings about the play.

Let's suppose you have an out-of-work actor named Aaron struggling to make the theater his life but finding little support and no parts, and it's a year past his thirtieth birthday. He's hit that crucial age where it's a matter of do or die, so in the tradition of other mediocre thespians like David Mamet, Aaron decides to make play-writing his ticket to the big leagues. But his first work never gets produced, and the second one becomes part of a jumble of new plays presented at St. Clement's Church -- a long jump from the Big White Way.

Then Providence steps in and someone gives Aaron a tip. Or perhaps the inspiration comes to him in a dream: Write a movie camouflaged as a play and send it to a major Hollywood producer. In other words, ignore the traditions of theater -- like originality, soul-searching encounters, and offbeat characters. Instead, load the piece with action and hundreds of brief scenes cutting quickly into one another, and include fairly stereotypical good and bad guys, a last-minute miracle, a power-packed climax, and a happy ending.

This trick works like a charm straight out of a B movie. David Brown (producer of The Sting, Jaws, and Cocoon, and who loves satisfying shlock) gets his money-churning hands on Aaron's script, proceeds to contact a group of Broadway producers, and engineers a first-class theatrical production in New York, where the play swiftly becomes a cash cow and lays the perfect groundwork for Brown's movie version, (about to be released and starring no less than Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise).

Having seen the play but not wishing to reveal the film's entire story line, I'll give you a brief rundown of the plot-heavy piece and assure you it would make for great celluloid, even if you could never class Sorkin in the company of Mamet or Tennessee Williams. After all, he's not a playwright in this incarnation, he's a screenwriter using live actors.

As everyone probably knows by now, the Marines regularly indulge in the type of testosterone-inspired hazing that goes on in fraternity houses and on football teams. Those who fall out of line must endure severe tests of mettle and macho -- punishment dispensed by their fellow officers. No dorks or schmoes tolerated. At the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on the tense windward side that faces the "wall" between us and them, the maniacal Lt. Col. Nathan Jessup and his Bible-frothing second-in-command, Lt. Jonathan James Kendrick, order "Code Reds" for soldiers who are not living up to their standards of perfection. For instance, if a Marine doesn't wash well enough, they order a Code Red, and in no time the other guys in his bunk have to strip him and scrub him with Brillo and steel wool until he bleeds. Then they slap each other on the back and go out for a beer. Sounds like fun.

Except for poor Pfc. William Santiago -- who has an incipient heart condition and displays a nasty habit of becoming short of breath and passing out on extensive field exercises -- for whom the Code Red turns to funereal black. His fellow officers, Lance Cpl. Harold Dawson and Pfc. Louden Downey, tie him up, gag him, and start to shave his head. But Santiago's heart problem kicks in, his lungs start to bleed, and no sooner than you can say sadism, he dies. Jessup and Kendrick deny they ordered any disciplinary action and let Dawson and Downey take the rap as flat-out murderers. Dawson (a military statue) and Downey (a hillbilly idiot) do not question their sentence, because that's what it means to be a Marine: to put the Corps before oneself.