Serena Brook and Shinah Hey Photo by Dan Norman

Matt and Ben's careers and friendship have been intertwined since then, including the years after they became college dropouts living in Sommerville, a Boston suburb, scrambling to go to auditions and launch those dreamed-about acting careers. They famously hit pay dirt in 1997 with the release of the film Good Will Hunting, for which they shared the 1998 Academy Award for best original screenplay, and in which they both starred.

In 2002, a young aspiring writer/comedienne with a big future of her own ahead, Mindy Kaling, and her friend and fellow aspiring writer/comedienne Brenda Withers thought it would be a lark to write a play about Matt and Ben in those early salad days, two Red Sox fans eating day-old pizza who suddenly find themselves in possession of, as if out of thin air, a brilliant screenplay, with acting roles for both, that will transform them in a flash into A-list celebrities. It's as if a genie escaped its bottle and granted them their wishes. Too good to be true, right? That's the gist, more or less, of the play they wrote and submitted to the New York Fringe Festival in 2002, where it was a hit, going on to an Off-Broadway run. If the conceit wasn't already rife with potential, Kaling and Withers added one more hitch: they stipulate that Ben and Matt be played by women.

Matt & Ben can be seen through June 8 at what is perhaps the coziest of our local theaters, The Hive Collaborative. The play is laugh-out loud funny, right from the pre-show announcements. Ben tells the audience the play will be one hour without an intermission. Matt corrects him, noting that it is actually 70 minutes, to which Ben comes back, "right, an hour," clueless to the distinction that matters to his focused friend.

The idea of having two women play these quintessential guys comes off as more than a cute gimmick. In their mid-twenties and eager to get on with achieving their goals, yet still being less than fully developed men, there is a "guy-ness" in their striving toward maturity, caught in those twilight years most young adults with high ambitions experience, between setting goals and having their act together enough to achieve them. Casting women to play these guys accentuates the ridiculousness of their strife, without appearing cynical.

This is especially the case given the wickedly sharp humor and sparkling chemistry between Serena Brook as Matt and Shinah Hey as Ben. Each actor splendidly inhabits their character. Hey's Ben Affleck is a smart aleck who looks for the easy way around a challenge, the kind of guy who sleeps with his best friend's prom date and can't figure out what was so bad about that. Hey delivers the requisite goofiness and cluelessness, but also the pure strain of loyalty to his friend, for whom he would do anything, and the sincerity of his desire to be an actor, albeit without being ready to put in the work that will entail. Brook invests Matt Damon with an earnestness and serious streak that frequently puts him at odds with his laid-back friend, but is also fettered by a certain degree of naivete.

Brook and Hey are wonderful together as Matt and Ben and also fare well in the secondary role each takes on for a scene (characters whose names I will omit, so as not to ruin the surprises).

Director Derek Prestly keeps the dynamic between Matt and Ben moving at a fast clip, slipping in all kinds of stage business in the most natural of ways, like grabbing and devouring a bag of chips, so that it really feels like we are flies on the wall of this low-rent starving actor apartment. The design, a collaborative effort under the shared helm of Abbee Warmboe and Eric Morris, provides a good facsimile of such an apartment, with second-hand store furniture, a ridiculous bean bag chair, and posters from movies in which our two heroes have had their first flashes of success doing bit parts. The costumes, devised by the actors, further reinforce the distinction between Matt's serious nature and Ben's avoidance of adulthood.

There are flashback scenes that show Matt and Ben's early efforts to collaborate, such as a disastrous performance of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" at their high school talent show–well, disastrous by Matt's reckoning, who had hoped the sincerity of their selection would impress a particular girl in the audience–but hilarious to Ben, who had undermined Matt's serious rendition of the song with wild and crazy antics. This is wonderful material, producing gales of laughter while demonstrating the elasticity and candor that has nurtured their friendship.

When the two come to blows–verbally and physically–over how to move forward with the brilliant screenplay that mysteriously landed in their laps, there is a believable release of frustration with one another, but we know full well that this capacity will prove not to be the end of their relationship, but an essential ingredient to its survival. Kaling and Withers have devised a wholly satisfying way to Jettison the story forward, from the invented mayhem that threatens to let Good Will Hunting<'/i> slip from their fingers to the actual outcome, which we have, of course, known from the beginning.

At seventy minutes (or an hour if you prefer), the show is a bit of a trifle, but one that is uproariously funny and graced by two splendid performances. I found it also to be a tribute to something we too rarely see depicted on stage or screen: a deep and lasting friendship between men, one in which both parties know the value of what they have and have made its endurance a priority in their lives.

Matt & Ben runs through June 8, 2025, at The Hive Collaborative (formerly Dreamland Arts Theatre), Hamline Ave. N., St. Paul MN. For tickets and information, please visit thehivecollaborativemn.com.

Playwright: Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers; Director: Derek Prestly; Lighting Design: Traci Joe; Sound Designer: Nick White; Set Design: Abbee Warmboe and Eric Morris; Costumes: Serena Brook and Shinah Hey; Props Designer: Anya Naylor

Cast: Serena Brook (Matt), Shinah Hey (Ben).