Matt & Ben
Bailiwick Repertory
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Gosh, I love True West. And I suspect that Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, the creators of Matt & Ben, do too: they have more than a passing familiarity with Sam Shepard’s 1980 classic. Their satirical off-Broadway hit even name-drops the leathery scribe. They added a dash of The Odd Couple to Shepard’s basic story, then blew it up to cartoon proportions by recasting the battling duo as Matt Damon and Ben Affleck pre-Good Will Hunting. But in this viciously goony 2002 comedy, the two don’t hammer away at a screenplay in a tequila-enhanced fog the way Shepard’s Austin and Lee do. Instead the script is a gift from above: it falls, neatly wrapped in brown paper, from the ceiling of Affleck’s grungy Cambridge postcollegiate pad while the boys are engaged in a desultory attempt at adapting The Catcher in the Rye. Maybe that is how Good Will Hunting arrived: neither Affleck nor Damon has penned anything since their maiden effort, which won them an Oscar, and the scripts they’ve chosen for Project Greenlight have been decidedly subpar.
In real life, Affleck and Damon are moderately gifted actors and writers who joined the ranks of celebrity royalty on the basis of a made-for-Hollywood backstory: two childhood friends hang on to their dreams and create a feel-good fable about a surly blue-collar genius. The thing is, it’s almost impossible to imagine the Affleck-Damon success story working for real if they’d been two women. The conventional wisdom is that the surest way for an actress to win an Oscar is to play not a genius but a hooker, a nun, or a disabled person. Which is why it’s so delicious that a pair of out-of-work female writer-actors like Kaling and Withers have made their mark by skewering the prematurely elevated likes of Matt and Ben. It’s doubly satisfying, almost downright radical, to see two women play them with such a casual, unapologetic air of entitlement–and to let loose with the kind of brawling that exists mostly in Shepard’s universe.
Oddly, the creators seem content to describe themselves as archetypal females: Vilim is the sunny, smiling blond while Feuerstein plays the troubled brunette whose wisecracks are attempts to hide her pain. They’re better at explaining the chemistry they share and the yin/yang nature of their friendship than they are at exploring issues of female identity, resorting to cliched devices like fashion-magazine quizzes and Barbies–mounds of which occupy the apron of the stage. And I think it’s time for a moratorium on performers playing children to remind us of a more innocent time.
