Maya Sofia Enciso (left) and Alejandra Villanueva in "Matt & Ben."  Jason Sullivan / Dupla Photography

            Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’ “Matt & Ben” was first seen at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. Twenty-four years later it still looks like so many typical Fringe offerings do: rowdy, ragged, a little rebellious.
            You’ll see what I mean next month when the San Diego International Fringe Festival returns.
            The titular “Matt & Ben” are Damon and Affleck, maybe Hollywood’s best buds ever. They met when they were 10 and 8 years old respectively and have forged a tight relationship socially and professionally that has endured 45 years. They also collaborated on a script for what would become “Good Will Hunting,” and that’s the impetus for Kaling and Withers’ one-act bromance comedy set in Affleck’s slop-happy apartment in South Boston in the mid-‘90s.
            New Village Arts in Carlsbad is staging the San Diego premiere of “Matt & Ben” with, as is prescribed, two female actors playing the leads: Maya Sofia Enciso as Damon, the straight man, and Alejandra Villanueva as Affleck, who’s depicted as a dashing doofus with the attention span of a 5-year-old. Maria Patrice Amon is making her New Village directorial debut, which gives this production a welcome all-Latina creative trio at its forefront.
            I can imagine Kaling and Withers, BFFs themselves, rolling on the floor as they composed “Matt & Ben,” written I assume for Fringe length – about an hour. The play it became is about 80 minutes long, which is about 65 minutes more than required for us to “get it.”
            “It” is that Damon and Affleck can’t help but be besties, in spite of competitiveness, professional jealousy, writer’s block or even the intrusions of Gwyneth Paltrow (Villanueva doing double duty) or J.D. Salinger (ditto Enciso).
            Most of the time “Matt & Ben” finds the boys hanging out, fueled by pizza and chips and donuts, trading “Bah-stin” accents and rough-housing more like kids than the young men they were. It’s frankly not that interesting.
            Possibly suggesting that Damon and Affleck stumbled onto the idea for “Good Will Hunting” rather than having toiled for one, Kaling and Withers’ story has the screenplay literally fall from the rafters, written and ready to go. But where the play goes from here is every which way without any particular rise and fall. Things just go down in Ben’s pad and we’re just flies on the wall having already circled the uneaten donuts.
            Performing “Matt & Ben” must be a physicality-minded actor’s dream and Villanueva especially seizes the day. Her Affleck is a human rowdydow. This boy just wants to have fun. Enciso gets her share of horseplay, but the script for “Matt & Ben” implies right away that Damon is the more focused of the two.
            I’m not sure what the “cameos” by Paltrow and Salinger add. I suspect it’s another case of Kaling and Withers going “I know! I’ve got it! Let’s have THIS happen!”
            The NVA production does add a couple of Hollywood touches in the form of clever projection design by Jesus Hurtado: at the start an illustrated depiction of director Amon that materializes before our eyes; at the end the actual Oscars ceremony TV footage from 1998 when then-baby-faced Damon and Affleck accepted their Best Screenplay award for “Good Will Hunting.”
            Seeing “Matt & Ben” may motivate theatergoers to revisit the film or in some cases watch it for the first time. Either way it’s worth it to hear Robin Williams’ psych professor character remind us that “Bad times wake us up to the good times we weren’t paying attention to.”
            That’s a message that transcends the passing years and their prescription that all of us, even Hollywood types, have to grow up sometime.
            “Matt & Ben” runs through April 26 at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad.

Left to right: Bruce Turk, Jacob Caltrider and Steven Lone in "The Lehman Trilogy."   Karli Cadel Photography

            They were the best of the American Dream and the Worst of the American Dream.
            Cygnet Theatre’s production of the Tony Award-winning “The Lehman Trilogy” begins with a family of immigrants (three brothers) from Bavaria that goes into the cotton business in Alabama and, over the course of more than 170 years and succeeding generations, become kings of Wall Street.
            Until they aren’t any longer.
            That it takes three hours, three acts and two intermissions in the telling is not a surprise given the scope of “The Lehman Trilogy,” which started as a poetic novel (“Qualcosa sui Lehman”) by Stefano Massini and was adapted for the stage by Ben Power. What is a surprise is that under the direction of Kim Strassburger and in the hands of three venerable actors (Bruce Turk, Steven Lone, Jacob Caltrider) it’s able to sustain itself that long, mining taut dramatic tension but also uncovering enough humanity to prevent the eventual titans of finance from becoming villains or at the very least unsympathetic figures. 
            The actors in the round inside Cygnet’s Dottie Studio Theater stand upon, around or sit at movable tables throughout the epic storytelling, which is largely expository in nature, as though they were taking turns reading massive Massini’s novel to the audience. That they rise above what otherwise might be an articulate though static narrative device is the wondrous conceit of “The Lehman Trilogy.” In portraying more than 70 characters between the three of them, Turk, Lone and Caltrider inhabit full, flesh-and-bones, warts-and-all figures, pumping life into the main characters (immigrant brothers Henry, Emanuel and Mayer respectively) and evoking the rich and complicated nature of each man.
            The first and slowest of the three acts (for it must establish who the Lehmans are, their backstories, and their at-the-time modest but noble aspirations) introduces the dignified and commanding Henry, who literally refers to himself as “The Head” of the family; the fiery Emanuel, considered “The Arm”; and the youngest brother Mayer, dismissed by the other two as the softer “Potato.” They are the foundation of what will be a sweeping account over the decades as each man meets his destiny, in one case sadly cut short.
            To backtrack for a moment, “The Lehman Trilogy” begins by referencing the 2008 financial cataclysm that brought the mighty Lehman Brothers firm to its knees; it won’t return to it until the very end of the play. This is not a three-plus-hour recounting of that day of reckoning but rather a dissection of the family of men who began with the simple aspirations of immigrants awed and provided with hope by their new country, and the greed and corruption that overcame them and those who descended from them.
            The second act is the most frankly entertaining of “The Lehman Trilogy,” with diverting moments like Emanuel’s smug son Philip (Turk) choosing “just the right” wife, or Mayer’s son Herbert (Lone) standing up to him in comic exasperation. Also witnessed is the emergence of Philip’s son Bobbie (Caltrider), who will become the dominant and domineering force of the final act.
            “The Lehman Trilogy” is not only the chronicle of a Jewish family initially in quest of belonging, and then later, profit and power. It is a history lesson and a crash course in American economics. The various Lehmans live through and survive the Civil War, the Great Depression (wrenchingly dramatized at the end of Act Two), Pearl Harbor and the Second World War. Simultaneously, the origins of the New York Stock Exchange are explained as is the troubling dichotomy between banking and trading, and most revealing, the tragic and shameless acknowledgement that Americans can be sold – and will buy – anything, whether or not they’ve got any money.
            While the 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy is a narrative inevitability, it is only the consequence of lifetimes of seduction by the aforementioned lure of power and profit.
            Cygnet’s cast of three is superb. The sheer volume of text and nuance of characters required of the actors is staggering enough. By the time the three are dancing atop tables to Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” it’s a wonder that they’ve got the stamina remaining to do so – though their commitment is never in question.
            Turk deftly shifts, for example, between Henry Lehman and Philip Lehman to the degree that they come off as entirely different men to us. Lone is the play’s visceral force in all of his characterizations. Caltrider’s underestimated “Potato” and the Robert Lehman who will regard both himself and his firm as immortal are potent and intuitive creations. (Caltrider also produces the sound of a crying infant like no one I’ve ever heard.)
            The smaller Dottie theater was a smart choice for a production such as this one which asks the audience to closely venture into the souls of these complex men. Projections by Blake McCarty accompany the chronicling, whether looking like the flashing trading updates in the NYSE orthe consuming flames of war. Scenic design (by Matthew Herman), lighting (Sammy Webster) and sound (George Ye) combine to create the illusion of time and space.
            Director Strassburger undertook this challenge with relish and can be duly proud of the result: theater in today’s era of preferred (including by me) 90-minute productions that compels audiences to listen and think for three hours, and more important, to be wary of those who embrace the American Dream but in so doing embrace their darker selves.
            “The Lehman Trilogy” runs through April 26 at Cygnet Theatre in Liberty Station, Point Loma.