Matt & Ben

One of my favorite plays is Brenda Withers and Mindy Kaling’s ‘MATT & BEN,’ which was originally put on in New York, (Mindy played the part of Ben Affleck, while Brenda was Matt Damon). It’s a really weird, funny, and quirky play that essentially explains how it’s possible that Matt and Ben could have written ‘Good Will Hunting.’ I’ve only ever read it, so I was super excited to hear that it was being performed at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. I went last night and let me just say that seeing it live was just as odd and fun as reading the play. Maggie Henry played Ben, and she did it with the same goofy and lovable quality that I always pictured, and Jessica Blair, played the driven and egotistical Matt with enough heart to make it... full review

http://blog.heymelpomene.com/2011/06/matt-and-ben-at-artworks-theater.html Matt & Ben is a lovingly spiteful piece of fanfic based on Mindy Kaling and Brenda Wither’s notion of what Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s lives must have been like at the brink of superstardom. The play depicts the two childhood friends as competitive, ambitious and lacking average intelligence. Ben (Maggie Henry) is a barely literate party guy, popular among the masses and charming to a fault. Matt (Jessica Blair) is an earnest hard worker, always looking to improve and challenge himself. While sitting in Affleck’s messy, junk food-strewn apartment, “adapting” Catcher in the Rye into a screenplay by merely changing the format of the text line by line, Hollywood’s... full review

Very funny stuff! Started to drag a little towards the end, but picked up again and finished strong. I highly recommend it!... full review

Maggie Henry and Jessica Blair ARE Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in this fantastic parody about the "true origin" behind the smash hit "Good Will Hunting." Henry personifies Affleck as an alpha male, and does it so naturally you'd think that she's been pounding brewskies, belching the alphabet and scratching her neither regions since birth. Blair channels Damon with such an uptight sincerity as the straight man in this new age odd couple that, to quote Ferris Bueller, "if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you'd have a diamond." It's fun watching them play off one another in their own oil-and-water fashion, but the payoff is witnessing how they've layered in an authentic, quiet affection for one another that can only be defined a... full review