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Actresses score with 'Matt & Ben'
Oakland Tribune, Nov 1, 2005 by Chad Jones, STAFF WRITER
BAY AREA audiences are used to gender bending. But what's with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck being played by women in ''Matt & Ben," a spirited comedy by Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers?
A New York Fringe Festival and off-Broadway hit several years ago, ''Matt & Ben" was originally performed by its authors, and now it's popping up all over the country, including a sharp production that opened Friday at San Francisco's Off-Market Theater.
So now that Kaling and Withers aren't performing the show, wouldn't it be just as easy to cast two men as Matt and Ben? The answer is most wholeheartedly no. The world already has a male Matt and Ben, and that's plenty. Minnie
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Driver, Winona Ryder, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez would likely agree.
Part of the fun of ''Matt & Ben" is watching two women -- Sarah Mitchell and Jennifer Dean in San Francisco -- discover their version of masculinity, especially as it pertains to two childhood friends struggling to become adults and to carve out a future in show business.
What could be nothing more than an hourlong sketch becomes, in the hands of the actors and director Christopher Jenkins, something a little more substantial. Granted, the main goal here is laughs, and there are plenty.
But the Kaling and Withers' script is sharp enough to cut into a meatier subtext about personal and professional jealousies, the nature of deep friendship and the fool's gold shine of fame and fortune. If nothing else, the play answers the question that has been troubling all of us for years: How did two rubes like Damon and Affleck end up writing the Academy Award-winning script for ''Good Will Hunting"?
In this version, the script literally falls from the ceiling and onto the grungy sofa in Ben's dingy Somerset, Mass., apartment.
The only real decoration in the apartment (set by Cat Stevans), aside from the Boston Red Sox curtains, is a movie poster for ''School Ties," a bomb in which both Damon and Affleck appeared.
So into this hovel comes the answer to Ben and Matt's problems: a beautifully written character study of a working-class genius with a good buddy whose charisma disguises the fact that he may be slightly retarded.
The question then becomes who plays which role? Harvard dropout Matt (Mitchell) assumes he'll take the role of Will, the genius, which leaves Ben (Dean) with the much less demanding role of Chucky.
Egos are bruised and truths are told. Ben tells Matt he has a fat behind (''Fat Damon"), and Matt tells Ben, the guy who combined the words ''chillin'" and ''relaxin'" into ''chillaxin'," he has no talent and should aim to be an action movie hero.
Before the play erupts into fisticuffs (fight choreography by Christopher Morrison), the boys receive two very funny otherworldly visits: one from Gwyenth (Dean), a future ex-love of
Affleck's, who comes offering Hollywood advice and the observation that David Schwimmer has one expression and looks like a mushroom. The other is from J.D. Salinger (Mitchell), the reclusive author of ''The Catcher in the Rye," a book that Matt and Ben happen to be trying to adapt into a screenplay
('' 'Adaptation' is the sincerest form of flattery," Ben says).
The play has great fun skewering the Affleck-Damon phenomenon. Since the play first appeared in 2002, both actors have suffered and survived. Damon finally broke through as a box-office star with ''The Bourne Identity" and ''Ocean's 11." He's now engaged and has a reputation as a hard worker and someone who takes chances (''The Talented Mr. Ripley").
Affleck proved a bankable (''Armageddon," ''Pearl Harbor") if not a great actor (''Gigli," ''Surviving Christmas," ''Jersey Girl," ''Daredevil," ''Paycheck" and the list goes on), though his greatest claim to fame at the moment is his relationships with women named Jennifer (Lopez and now wife Garner).
Imagining how their careers began -- with a push from the eternal screenplay known as fate -- is a nice reminder that it's really more a matter of being in the right place at the right time than it is about talent. Celebrity, it turns out, is really a fluke, a curse and a painful test of character.
You can e-mail Chad Jones at cjones@angnewspapers.com or call (925) 416-4853.
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