Good-luck hunting Matt & Ben unmasks Damon and Affleck BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Matt & Ben By Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers. Directed by David Warren. Set and lighting by Shane Kelly. With Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Jennifer R. Morris. Presented by EarthHart Productions at Harvard University’s Winthrop House through November 6.

In the low-key-subversive Matt & Ben, the screenplay for Good Will Hunting falls through the ceiling of a Somerville apartment onto the knuckle heads of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck circa 1995. What crashed through the roof onto twentysomething playwrights Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers a couple of years ago was a funny idea for a postmodern stage doodle that is more fun to contemplate than to sit through, at least in the cute rather than scathing production that has touched down as close as the play may come to the scene of the crime: the stage of the Winthrop House Junior Common Room at Harvard.

Kaling and Withers paint a loopy, nipping sketch of pre-celebrity Cambridge homies Damon and Affleck, unlikely friends and even more unlikely Hollywood demigods-to-be, hanging around the latter’s slobby Somerville digs and trying to turn themselves into screenwriters amid frat-boy detritus ranging from copious junk food to posters for Guinness and Hendrix. Then, to turn their Saturday Night Live idea into something more absurd and self-reflexive, the two female playwrights (who are also actors) undertook, in the award-winning 2002 New York International Fringe Festival production that moved Off Broadway, to play Damon and Affleck themselves — or, rather, to play the idea of Damon and Affleck, since little actual impersonation is involved. Adding another layer of irony is the way the engaging actors on view at Harvard have been cast less because they resemble the stars of Gigli and The Bourne Supremacy than because they look like the authors, with the tall, lanky, white Jennifer R. Morris playing Matt to the chunkier, African-American Quincy Tyler Bernstine’s Ben. The whole thing is kind of a goof, but one with more satiric muscle than it overtly flexes.

As Matt & Ben begins, before the Good Will Hunting script drops from Heaven, our heroes are flatfootedly attempting to adapt The Catcher in the Rye for the screen. Matt, having just loped in with a pizza, sprawls on the diseased couch with a slice, dictating dialogue from the book to Ben, who knits his brow at a computer keyboard and requests that "as before, please spell any words you think I might have trouble with." (These include "lousy" and "don’tcha.") Matt, it’s clear, considers himself the brains as well as the talent of the operation, and though humoring his dimwitted hunk of a high-school buddy in the screenplay caper, he’s secretly auditioning for a local production of Buried Child. (Ben on Sam Shepard: "He was in The Pelican Brief, I love that guy.") And how do we know that the less prepossessing Ben is the girl magnet here? A headshot of the real Affleck adorns the Anheuser-Busch keg that’s doing duty as an end table. In some respects, this short, deceptively casual send-up is a more layered onion than Peer Gynt.

But back to what’s actually on stage. Matt & Ben, which inevitably builds to fisticuffs, is as much a meditation on the volatility and the vagaries of friendship (particularly male) as it is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on how, in an America dominated by Hollywood, any boy can grow up to be a star. Pal-saddled Matt is the striving hard worker here, Ben the dumbbell dilettante — though as is demonstrated by a flashback to a high-school talent show in which Matt wends his sincere way through "Bridge over Troubled Water" until Ben gets bored with his back-up role and starts cat-calling, chillin’ Ben is the more charismatic. In addition to questioning whether Damon and Affleck penned their Oscar-winning screenplay, Matt & Ben portrays both stars as pretty bad actors. After they’ve squabbled over who will play Will Hunting in their newly tripped-over dramaturgical manna, each takes a turn, with Bernstine’s hilarious rendering of Ben’s lame rendering of English-accented love interest Skylar a highlight.

With its direct audience address and surreal interludes keyed by Twilight Zone–like music, Matt & Ben sets up its own arbitrary interior logic and mostly sticks to it. The piece is, among other things, an ingenuous guerrilla assault on the whole business of image, with Bernstine making a breezy, non-imitative dream appearance as Gwyneth Paltrow fretting over her "huge lard ass" while maniacally licking a cupcake. Harder to make heads or tails of is Morris’s turn as a hallucinated but friendly muffler-clad J.D. Salinger whose accent runs the gamut from cockney to Down East to Kate Hepburn. (The famously reclusive author asks for pudding and announces that he’s sold the rights to Catcher to action director John Woo.) But don’t ask Matt & Ben, with its absurdist premise, to make sense — or even to live up to its hype. Just look at it as a brief candle to The Odd Couple or a couple of slackers brandishing WMD: weapons of movie-star destruction.