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The true story of pals Damon & Affleck
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
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Quick: name as many celebrity twosomes as you can whose names go together like peanut butter and jelly. Well, there’s Ike and Tina, Edith and Archie, Beavis and Butt-head, Merchant and Ivory, Ben and — no, sorry, "Bennifer" doesn’t count anymore. Ben’s partner in crime long before J. Lo shimmied onto the scene was, of course, Matt Damon. And it’s that dynamic duo who made a splash at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival and went on to Off Broadway. Okay, it wasn’t actually the boys in person. Mindy Kaling & Brenda Withers’s Matt & Ben clinched the "Best in Fringe" prize that year, and now it’s being brought to the very Harvard University stage where back in 1993, legend has it, Damon performed as an undergraduate before heading to Los Angeles. Kaling and Withers, both Dartmouth graduates, were roommates in Astoria when Affleck’s visit to rehab earned him countless shots on the front cover of tabloids and glossies. Fascinated by the media’s portrayal of his persona, the women set out to write a speculative account of the pre-paparazzi life of the Cambridge-bred buddies. Their script, which begins with Matt and Ben trying to devise a film adaptation of Catcher in the Rye when the screenplay for Good Will Hunting falls through the ceiling into their Somerville apartment, quickly took on a surreal, goofy tone. It struck them that the only way to pull off the absurd premise was to play the roles themselves. "We thought of the idea that a script falls from the sky," Kaling explains over the phone from LA, where she’s writing for NBC’s The Office, on which she will also appear next year, her first female role after 16 months of wearing a zip-up tracksuit as Ben. "I think that’s a metaphor for getting an idea. And that kind of only works on an absurd level. If we had had two guys playing them, it wouldn’t have been much more than a Saturday Night Live skit. Having two women play the parts added a layer of absurdity and made it worth doing." To judge from the attention the play received at the Fringe and Off Broadway (attention due in part to the broken nose Kaling’s Ben inflicted on Withers’s Matt during a snafu in a staged scuffle), few would contest that assessment. And when the writer/actor duo took the show to LA, it continued to play in New York. Jennifer Morris and Quincy Tyler Bernstine, who also happened to be friends, became the first actresses to take over the parts. They’ll perform when the show opens next Thursday at Harvard’s Winthrop House. (For the record, that isn’t far from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, Matt and Ben’s alma mater, which is mentioned more than once in the script.) Morris says it didn’t take too long to adapt to playing a man. "We aren’t trying to impersonate Matt and Ben. We’re not even trying to impersonate men; it’s more suggesting men. It’s actually a real play, more like The Odd Couple or True West. It’s a comedy, but there’s a real play there — about two brawling guys. One is more chilled and relaxed — that’s Ben. And Matt Damon is more intense and anal-retentive and buttoned-up and trying to make it all happen. I was surprised that I was moved [by the script], but underneath all the wit and celebrity is a real play about a real friendship." Matt & Ben is presented by EarthHart Productions at Harvard University’s Winthrop House Theatre, Mill Street in Harvard Square, October 28 through November 6. Tickets are $25; call (617) 496-2222.
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