Matt And Ben Script Pdf
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Regional Reviews: Los Angeles Matt & Ben Also see Sharon's review of Mindy Kaling (Ben) and Brenda Wither (Matt) The first rule of funny: Be fast. No joke is funny if you see it coming. Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers' Off-Broadway hit, Matt & Ben is fast and furious. And funny as hell. The concept is deceptively simple: the two women portray Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, back when they're sharing a Boston apartment and trying to write their first script. Right off the bat, Kaling and Withers make it clear that their story is not entirely based on reality.
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They posit that Good Will Hunting wasn't actually written by the boys, but instead fell from the sky into their laps. So the play that you're watching isn't really about Damon and Affleck as you know them through tabloid stories and movie successes, it's just about two friends and what they do when the best script they've ever seen magically appears in their living room. Well, that's not entirely true. By basing their show on Damon and Affleck, Kaling and Withers get loads of laughs by playing caricatures of the real Hollywood stars. Withers plays Matt as the intellectual of the two - he's the brains of this operation and the better actor. He's also something of a dork. In comparison, Kaling's Ben is the friendly, playful, outgoing one who gets all the girls - but he's a complete moron.
(When the show starts, Matt and Ben are trying to adapt Catcher in the Rye into a screenplay by typing it, line by line, into script form. Ben sits at his computer and asks Matt to read him the next page of the novel 'and, as usual, please spell any words you think I may have trouble with.' ) And once Good Will Hunting falls from the sky, our two heroes face moral dilemmas aplenty.
No, not whether they should claim the script as their own - of course they're going to do that - but Matt wonders whether he should carry his loser friend along with him on the script, and both men fight over who gets to play Will. Clip art studio download. (A highlight of the play is when they act out a scene from the script, with Matt playing Will and Ben in the Minnie Driver role.
And if you think that's funny, wait till they switch parts.) The play is sprinkled with flashbacks and dream sequences, ultimately has its heart in the right place, and wraps everything up in a quick one-hour running time. It's well-written, well-played, and inspired - if the script for Matt & Ben fell from the sky into Kaling and Withers's hands, they sure knew what to do with it. Matt & Ben runs at the ACME Comedy Theatre in Hollywood through May 16, 2004. For information, see. Victoria Lang & Pier Paolo Piccoli; Stephen Pevner; Jason Hsiao; in association with Stephanie Steele and Lisa Ullmann present Matt & Ben. Written and Performed by Mindy Kaling & Brenda Withers. Set Design James Youmans; Lighting Design Jeff Croiter; Sound Design Fitz Patton; Costume Design Anne Sung; Production Stage Manager Marie Turcotte; Press Representative David Elzer/DEMAND PR; Management Consultants Martian Entertainment, Inc.
Matt And Ben Play Script
Mindy Kaling
Directed by David Warren. Photo by Jason Lindberg.
If you are under 30—correction, make that 25—live physically or mentally in the East Village, derive your intellectual sustenance from cult movies and pop culture, and think that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Good Will Hunting rates a toothless spoof stretched out to 70 minutes, then Matt & Ben is for you. Written and performed by two Dartmouth graduates, Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, this persiflage might have made it as a five-minute—correction, three-minute—skit on Saturday Night Live. Who in his adult mind would want to satirize Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s pleasantly unimportant movie?
I guess Mindy, who is Indian and short and plays big Ben Affleck, and Brenda, who is blonde and tall and plays smaller Matt Damon (get the joke?). If at least they could make some validly sardonic points about those two hotshots—well, they get off one rather obvious J.Lo joke, and one about Gwyneth Paltrow, whom, along with J. Salinger, they also impersonate, but other than that, this could as well be, instead of about two dubious filmmakers, about two sophomoric playwrights, Mindy & Brenda. The chief comic conceit is that while the two are hopelessly plugging away at a screen adaptation of Catcher in the Rye, there drops in a plain brown wrapper from Ben’s ceiling the screenplay of Good Will Hunting with their names on it. This is bizarre enough, but where is the satire, 70 desperate minutes of it, in that? The pals bicker, horse around, perform a Simon and Garfunkel song, have fantasies of Paltrow and Salinger dropping in on them (not from the ceiling), engage in fisticuffs, and do other similarly witty things with matching dialogue. The downtown crowd, proudly catching allusions to Latino women and such, laughs unbridledly.
The young women perform about as well as they write. Withers makes an effort to sound masculine (not that it helps), while Kaling is just smart-ass. David Warren’s direction does what it can, which isn’t much. If the script of Matt & Ben also dropped from the ceiling, as it well might have, why couldn’t it, like the Good Will Hunting script in the play, have its pages go blank before it ever got produced?