STAGE WEST: "Matt & Ben" at New Village Arts Theatre

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.