‘Matt & Ben’ not as good as it thinks

Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’ 2003 Off-Broadway spoof of success, Hollywood and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck is slight but occasionally smile-worthy. The title roles are played by two women for no other reason, I suppose, than to let us know right away that this is meant to be a far-out send-up of a put-down. (Or maybe it’s just because both writers wanted to play the roles Off-Broadway, which they did.)

Matt, here, is an earnest, hardworking and pretentious actor wannabe. Ben likes to get by on his (hers?) good looks. The high-school friends are writing a screenplay of “Catcher in the Rye” when a script of “Good Will Hunting” magically falls from Ben’s apartment ceiling. We know that this is the treasure that will bring the two money, glory, and an Academy Award. So, the main joke is that these schmucks never wrote, or didn’t deserve, the movie that brought them stardom. (The idea isn’t as hysterical as the writers seem to think.)

Most of the brief evening is spent chronicling the petty (fictional) arguments between the pair while they try to work to create something that will make them famous.

The script, for all its flaws, at least gives two actors a chance to fool around with comically mean-spirited chit-chat. Director Justy Hutchins, though, doesn’t have the feel for this foolery. She has her two actresses — Caitlin Shea (Matt) and Erika Bakse (Ben) — scream at each other nearly nonstop on the same, blood-curdling level. Shea, in particular, uses a high-pitched delivery that brings to mind fingernails deeply penetrating the length of a chalkboard. Bakse, at times, is humorous in her attempt at a jocular, jock attitude, but she’s straitjacketed by Hutchins’ painfully frantic pacing.

Curious, too, how once again Hutchins (who last directed “Stocking Stuffers” at the Little Theatre) gives us an uncredited and totally uninteresting set . Does Hutchins not know that theater is a visual medium and that creativity can make even no-budget productions appealing to the eye?

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheaterchat @aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.