Brenda and Mindy and Matt and Ben

AN IRREVERENT OFF-BROADWAY SURPRISE CASTS TWO YOUNG ALUMNAE IN THE SPOTLIGHT.

IT'S A RAINY NIGHT IN LATE AUGUST in New York City. The show is over, but the die-hard fans are gathered outside the stage door, waiting for a glimpse of the stars. Finally, they emerge: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, out of makeup and costumes. Except they look different now. They've taken on the form of two young women, Brenda Withers '00 and Mindy Kaling '01.

What's wrong with this picture? For Withers and Kaling, absolutely nothing. They are Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Or, at least, they star as Damon and Affleck in the off-Broad-way blockbuster hit, Matt & Ben, which they also wrote. This 65-minute play follows the entirely-made-up travails of Damon and Affleck in 1995, before they were famous, as they haplessly struggle to turn The Catcher in the Rye into a screenplay. An act of God interrupts and saves them: The script for Good Will Hunting—the real 1997 film starring the real Damon and Affleck, who shared an Academy Award for their screenplay—literally falls through the ceiling, in finished form, and lands on their laps.

"We were living together in my brothers apartment," explains Withers, a tall former drama major who plays Damon in the show. "We were looking for a place to live, and maybe to get a job, but we couldn't. We were holed up in the apartment and all these magazines kept coming in with Ben Affleck on the cover."

The duo began taking long walks in the park and improvising scenes: Matt and Ben at their high school tal- ent show, Ben having a conversation with J.D. Salinger. A script began to take shape. After further development in a workshop, the play was presented at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2002, followed by the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen in early 2003. The off-Broadway run, at P.S. 122, a tiny theater in the East Village, began in July—and tapped straight into the Bennifer Zeitgeist. In fact, the Affleck/J.Lo turkey Gigli opened in movie theaters the very same week.

For Kaling and Withers, the overnight success was dizzying, and a curious refraction of the overnight successes of the very men they were skewering. The pop-culture media couldn't get enough of the two charming, attractive, articulate young women who dared to go after the Hollywood elite.

"We do interviews like this one, where people ask us thoughtful questions," says Withers. "But because of the subject matter we've also been interviewed by Entertainment Weekly and Us Weekly. At Us Weekly they were like, 'Hi, who's your favorite one? How tall are you, and how tall is Matt?"'

"We're meeting people we've only ever dreamt of," adds Kaling, who was well known at Dartmouth (as Mindy Chokalingam) for her popular comic strip in The D, "Badly Drawn Girl." "Like we're meeting with Miramax. We don't even know why. They're like, 'Come in and talk to us.'"

Not that Kaling and Withers are complaining about the attention. Last summer the show was consistently selling out and was extended through March 2004. Stars such as Nicole Kidman and Steve Martin showed up to see what the fuss was all about. The women were taking meetings and talking about developing a television pilot, in which the Indian-American Kaling and the blonde Withers would play sister, And they were trying their best to enjoy this "almost famous" moment.

"We wish we had money," says Withers. "But there's something nice about being right here, where we're having a good time and doing something we're proud of."

A perfectly happy, almost Good WillHunting-esque ending for our heroines, right? Well, yes—except for one lingering question: What the heck do the real Matt and Ben think about all of this? So far, nothing. They haven't seen the show; their handlers won't comment.

Withers and Kaling remain cautously optimistic. "They're such golden boys and they're doing so well," says Withers, "a little ribbing isn't going to hurt."

Kaling (left) and Withers "have a fine, deadpan sense of the absurd and the vicious," Wrote a New YorkTimes theater critic.

CHRISTOPHER KELLY is the film criticfor The Fort Worth Star-Telegram