Colonel Nathan Jessep takes the witness stand in A Few Good Men with the self-assurance of a man who has spent his life being obeyed. He regards the young Navy lawyer questioning him with something approaching contempt. After all, Jessep has commanded Marines, defended his country and made decisions that other men lack the stomach to contemplate and, this insolent lieutenant expects him to explain himself.
It is the climactic confrontation in Aaron Sorkin's military courtroom drama and its return to Broadway raises a wistful question When did America last have villains this impressive?
In Michael Arden's revival at Lincoln Center, Bradley Whitford plays Jessep opposite Tom Blyth's Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee. The production, which opens on October 29, returns Sorkin's 1989 play to the stage at a moment when its vision of American authority can feel almost impossibly remote.
There is something seductive about Jessep's command of language and his absolute conviction that duty demands sacrifice. He is arrogant and ultimately culpable, yet belongs to a world in which even the bad guys seem to possess qualities Americans might wish their leaders still had—competence, seriousness and a sense of obligation to something that is beyond themselves.
The Romance of American Authority
The peculiar nostalgia of A Few Good Men is that a play written to expose the failures of American authority now makes us long for an era when even the men who abused that authority seemed worthy of being taken seriously.
Jessep is the perfect example. He is a dangerous man who has built a moral world in which the demands of national security excuse cruelty and the authority of command places him beyond ordinary judgment. His subordinates have learned that obedience matters more than conscience, a fact that leads to the death of a young Marine. When lawyers enter the base to investigate said death, Jessep treats them like children who cannot begin to comprehend the burdens he carries.
What makes Jessep so compelling is that his corruption grows out of qualities that might, under different circumstances, have made him admirable. He has devoted his life to an institution he considers greater than himself. He also believes the protection of his country requires extraordinary sacrifice and he has accepted a share of that burden. His fatal error is to believe that sacrifice entitles him to decide which rules apply to him.
There is something almost Shakespearean about a man whose virtues have curdled into vices.
Arden, who suggested reviving the play after being approached about directing at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City, was surprised by how little Sorkin's original required updating.
"What was so striking to me when I read the piece again when thinking about doing it, I felt like, oh, it actually just kind of works," he told Newsweek. "The questions of the play about following illegal orders and responsibility and culpability are timeless."
He had wanted to direct a classic American play with large ideas and a substantial ensemble. His choices, he joked, came down to Shakespeare or Sorkin.
The comparison may have been playful, but Jessep belongs to a long dramatic tradition of powerful men undone by the very qualities that made them powerful. Like Shakespeare's great antagonists, he commands our attention even as he forfeits our sympathy.
When Even the Villains Believed in Something
What makes this particularly affecting in 2026 is the possibility that Americans have grown nostalgic for a kind of authority they once took for granted.
Jessep's generation of fictional officers inhabits a world in which professional competence is assumed to matter. The men who command institutions are expected to understand them and their authority is therefore rooted, at least in principle, in years of service and the acceptance of responsibilities that ordinary citizens are spared.
Today's public culture can seem to reward a different performance of power, where contempt for expertise can serve as proof of authenticity. Against that backdrop, even Jessep begins to look like a relic of a more serious age.
This is an uncomfortable thought, because the play gives us every reason to reject him. The military hierarchy he embodies has enabled an abuse of power that ends in a young man's death. To make matters worse, the obedience he demands has relieved his subordinates of the obligation to think for themselves.
Sorkin's drama assumes that the institution contains the means to expose its own failures. Its lawyers believe the truth can be established through evidence as long as its officers can be compelled to answer questions. Even a colonel must eventually submit to judgment.
Arden sees this faith in human fallibility and improvement as central to Sorkin's appeal.
"What I love so much about Aaron's writing is that he is an optimist if there ever was one," he said. "He believes people make mistakes and they can learn from them."
That optimism may be the most unfamiliar thing about A Few Good Men today. Sorkin imagined an America in which the corruption of an institution could be exposed without destroying the possibility of believing in it.
Perhaps that is why we miss the bad guys. Even they belonged to a world in which authority still had to answer to something greater than itself.