“Beyond Glory,” Stephen Lang’s square-jawed look at common men and their uncommon acts of valor, opens with a brief snippet from the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech in “Henry V.” Shakespeare’s rallying cry has been used for jingoistic purposes in the past, most notably in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film, but the standard directorial interpretation in recent years has been to regard its urgings (“Gentlemen in England now-a-bed / Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here”) as cynical propaganda used to lure young men to a mud- and blood-soaked death.

In portraying eight recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest recognition of bravery in wartime, Mr. Lang works hard to split the difference between these two ideological extremes. His adaptation of Larry Smith’s 2003 oral history finds room to convey the respect but also the frustration these men feel toward America. Some struggle to be worthy of their nation; some, as with the member of the all-black “Buffalo Soldier” division who waited more than 50 years to see his heroic efforts acknowledged, wait patiently for their nation to prove itself worthy of them.

They have found a capable and emphatic proponent in Mr. Lang. With his slate-gray brush cut and burly forearms, the ropy tendons visible in his neck, the familiar character actor might have stepped right off of Parris Island. Mr. Lang’s credits include military men from Vietnam (John Patrick Shanley’s “Defiance”), the Civil War (the film “Gettysburg”), and even Guantanamo Bay (the original Broadway production of “A Few Good Men”), and he adds another eight compelling enlisted men to his résumé with this sturdy if hardly groundbreaking monodrama.

Like those he commemorates, his portrayals are crisp, efficient, no-nonsense. With the exception of one late interaction between two recipients, Mr. Lang moves steadily from one character to the next, using little more than a few articles of clothing to differentiate them. The script includes some forced banter between a few honorees and an unseen soldier presenting them with their medal, but for the most part, Mr. Lang and director Robert Falls let each soldier tell his own story in his own way, with repetitions and tangents mixed among the nightmarish details.

“Ours is an age in need of and in search of heroes,” Mr. Smith writes in the foreword to his book, and these men easily fit the bill. That said, nearly all of the soldiers whom Smith interviewed deflect any notion of heroism to nearcomic extremes. Hector Cafferata disputes the idea that he fought off an enemy regiment in Korea single-handedly, pointing out that a companion who had been blinded by a grenade was able to reload his rifle for him.

Even when the stories are more pedestrian, a common thread emerges: The concept of “above and beyond the call of duty” is practically alien to these men. Risking one’s own life to save that of your fellow soldier is part of the call of duty. “I know I did it, though I’ll be damned if I know how I did it,” Cafferata says. “But I can tell you why I did it. I did it because I’m a Marine. That’s just what Marines do.”

The book’s two most recognizable subjects are included: Daniel Inouye, the longtime U.S. Senator of Hawaii who lost an arm in World War II, and James Stockdale, who spent more than seven years in a Vietnam prisoner-of-war camp. Conspicuously absent, however, is former Senator Bob Kerrey, whose stint in Vietnam was later clouded by disclosures that his team of Navy SEALs shot and killed 13 unarmed women and children. His reminiscences are among the book’s most philosophical and erudite, a stance that clashes with Mr. Lang’s plain spoken approach. His and Mr. Falls’s focus on accessibility verges on pandering at times, particularly in the case of John Finn, the randy old codger who kicks off the evening with his salty Pearl Harbor memories.

The eight men who did make the cut have very different backgrounds and outlooks on life, which gives Messrs. Lang and Falls plenty of room to toy with various accents and actorly tricks. “Beyond Glory” falters at the very end, however, by conjoining the eight soldiers’ most universal — and therefore least character-specific — reflections into a syrupy montage. The war-memorial stiffness that occasionally threatens to derail the play is at its thickest at this point, undermining the singular acts that earned these brave men accolades in the first place.

Where “Beyond Glory” does break new ground is in its admission that war can be exhilarating as well as excruciating. Popular entertainment tends to depict combat as either a consequence-free shoot-’em-up or hell on earth; not much middle ground exists between “The Green Berets” and “Full Metal Jacket.” Many anti-war works include a character who derives a thrill from the carnage, but this person is invariably dismissed as a bloodthirsty sociopath.

The other war-themed plays to reach New York in recent months — revivals of the World War I drama “Journey’s End” and the Vietnam-era “The Brig” — fell decidedly into the war-is-hell category, and most of the men in “Beyond Glory” remember the war years with a similarly jaundiced eye. But we also meet Lewis Millett and his almost gleeful recollection of a vengeful retaliation in Korea. Even more vehement is Nicky Bacon, who rattles off a dizzying list of survival techniques with the breathless cadences of an adventure junkie.

And yet “Beyond Glory” does not discriminate between these men and the medic who ministered to casualties even after sustaining a bullet wound to the head (“It left me with a hell of a headache”) or the prisoner of war who inspired his comrades by stoically enduring years of torture. “This story shall the good man teach his son,” Henry V promised his men on the eve of their fateful battle in Agincourt. By showing how even a few good men are capable of a few bad things along with their heroic deeds, Mr. Lang imparts his brutal lesson with the complexity it deserves.

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