BREN: What do we want to do? What do we want to say?
ME: I think there should be only two characters, so we don"t have to pay anyone.
Bren types this. Pause.
BREN: Do you want to go watch the Jamie Kennedy Experiment?
ME: Totally.
This went on for months. We could spend the entire hour arguing about the plausibility of Harry Potter and not write a single word.
In the early 2000s, the actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck loomed large in our lives. They loomed large in everyone"s lives, actually. This was the height of Bennifer. Sorry, I hate to resuscitate that term, which the media has thankfully put to bed, but it"s important to remember what a phenomenon it was. It was like Pippa Middleton plus Beyonce"s legs times the latest Apple product. Bennifer was so big it was as though two people had never been in love before, and they had discovered it. I think it"s also easy to forget that Bennifer created the trend of the blended celebrity couple name. Without Bennifer we wouldn"t have Brangelina or Tomkat, or even the less used Jabrobra (James Brolin and Barbra Streisand). That is the gift that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez gave us that has withstood the test of time.
Brenda and I have always done "bits," even before we knew they were called "bits." Bits are essentially "nonsense time" or, to describe it more pejoratively, "f.u.c.king around." We would take on characters, acting like them for a while on the way to the subway, or getting ready to go out. For whatever reason, around this time our favorite recurring bit was when Bren played Matt Damon and I was Ben Affleck. We played the "guys" very naturalistically, but they had a slightly jock-like, dude posture, and slightly lower voices. Again, have I emphasized how well we fit into our lesbian neighborhood?
Soon, our Matt and Ben had a rich and completely made-up backstory and dynamic. They had private jokes and shared memories: again, all made up. We did no research on the actual people, because we didn"t care about their actual pasts; the real Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were simply jumping-off points for our Matt and Ben. It was a special kind of fun to be two best friends playing two other best friends.
Once we had characters, albeit nutty ones, we gained focus. If I can give one bit of advice to any drama major, high school theater kid, or inmate who is reading this in a prison library with dreams of being cast in the prison play, it"s this: write your own part. It is the only way I"ve gotten anywhere. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands. It forces you to think about what your strengths really are, and once you find them, you can showcase them, and no one can stop you. I wasn"t going to be able to showcase what I did best in an Off-Off-Broadway revival of Our Town. I was going to do it playing Ben Affleck. The premise for Matt & Ben is weird but simple: the script for Good Will Hunting falls from the ceiling of twenty-one-year-old Ben Affleck"s apartment while the two are working on a screen adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye. They stop work and wonder about the significance of what has happened. The tone is somewhere between The X-Files and The Odd Couple. Here is one of the first scenes we wrote. Matt has arrived late to meet Ben, who is annoyed at him. Matt is late because he was auditioning for a play.
MATT
And I went, I had to go to this thing first, and then I came here.
BEN
What thing?
MATT
Nothing, just this audition thing.
BEN
For what?
MATT
For nothing. You don"t know Shepard? Sam Shepard?
BEN
Yeah, of course.
MATT
You do?
BEN
Yeah, he was in The Pelican Brief, I love that guy. With the wrinkles? Is he in the play?
MATT
Uh, no he wrote the play, this play called "Buried Child." Won a Pulitzer. Anyway, it was nothing. It didn"t happen.
BEN
What didn"t happen? The audition?
MATT
No, I don"t know. We"ll see.
BEN
What"s the part?
MATT
Vince.
BEN
No, what kind of part? Is it good?
MATT
Yeah. They were looking for a blonde.
BEN
A dark blonde? Cause you"re not blonde.
We entered the play in the New York International Fringe Festival. Jocelyn and our friend Jason produced it, and we sold out every show. I think it was largely because of our tireless gra.s.sroots marketing. By gra.s.sroots, I mean, of course, environmentally destructive pestlike papering of the entire boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Each of us took stacks of postcards and put them in every diner, indie record store, and frites shop we could. (This was in that eight-month window in 2002 where frites were incredibly popular.)
We didn"t want to pay a director to direct the show, so Bren and I directed it ourselves. It was a given that we would also star in it, not just because it was fun, but because, again, we didn"t want to pay anyone. Our cheapness was the recurring source of our creative decisions. The set was minimal and we wore guys" clothes that we"d borrowed from Brenda"s brothers, Jeff and Terry. We had no idea what we were doing, but we had a purpose after two years of living in New York and not having one. Matt & Ben was a respite from helplessness.
In 2002, the Fringe Festival named us Best Play of all five hundred shows. The New Yorker wrote of the show: "Goofy, funny, and improbably believable ... Kaling and Withers have created one of the most appealing male-bonding stories since Damon and Pythias. Or Oscar and Felix." That quote was easy to access because I have it tattooed on my clavicle.