Shepard himself veers between the two worlds and it's evident that the lines blurred long ago.) With the wrinkles?'' (That exchange may seem to encapsulate the difference between traditional, serious drama and Hollywood-driven fame, but think about how Mr. ''He was in 'The Pelican Brief,' '' Ben says. Matt has just auditioned for a Sam Shepard play Ben is insulted that Matt thinks he doesn't know who Sam Shepard is. Kaling sits at the computer typing their work-in-progress, a screen adaptation of ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' and asks for help with spelling. Withers is dressed like a preppie, in khakis and an Oxford shirt. The play's biggest laughs come when its creators are lampooning the familiar smart-Matt, dumb-Ben images. Like the campy, now-aging ''Real Live Brady Bunch'' play and the current ''Avenue Q,'' the adult puppet musical that nods to ''Sesame Street,'' ''Matt & Ben'' represents a theater that appeals to a younger generation's pop cultural assumptions, a forward-looking theater that is not snobbish about movies, television or US Weekly. Its irreverent tone and the blithe way the women assume male roles would have fit right in with the stand-up comedy and sketch humor all around it.
It's not surprising that ''Matt & Ben'' was the only play at this year's United States Comedy and Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. That attitude helps the play speak to a younger audience raised on movies, television and entertainment gossip, for whom ''Saturday Night Live'' and ''Mad TV'' are bedrocks of popular comedy. To us, the Ben and Jen Show is a real-life popcorn movie, a humorous diversion the ring only proves that Harry Winston can be gauche too. The creators of ''Matt & Ben,'' with their fond but pointed sendup of celebrity overload, understand that while we're insatiably fascinated by stars and their bizarre spectacles, we don't care in any profound sense. People magazine, Jay Leno and the rest of the adoring infotainment industry maintain the pretense that celebrities matter to us personally. The heads of critics and audiences are bursting with icky echoes of the couple's hourlong ''Dateline'' interview, in which they pretended to be surprised at the media attention, and with images of her flashing what is inevitably described as her 6.1-carat pink diamond engagement ring custom made by Harry Winston. Only Ben and Jen overload can account for the savage critical response. Like this summer's excruciatingly dull Harrison Ford film - a widely panned box-office dud - ''Gigli'' is the kind of big-budget turkey that's never hard to find. But it's not unwatchably, off-the-charts, ''Showgirls'' bad. Any romantic comedy about a smart lesbian mob enforcer who falls for a bumbling male mob enforcer who has kidnapped a brain-damaged young man is probably going to stink.
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How quickly they've forgotten ''From Justin to Kelly,'' the ''American Idol'' movie that bombed just two months ago. To define the downside you need only a single word, ''Gigli,'' the Ben and Jen movie attacked by critics as one of the worst in memory. The play suggests an unintended benefit of celebrity overload: infotainment as the ultimate sow's ear that satirists can transform. Actually, here it falls from the ceiling into Ben's shabby apartment, cluttered with beer cans, nachos and a framed head shot of himself.
''Matt & Ben'' depicts the only plausible explanation: the screenplay fell from the sky. We all know the story, of how two best friends came out of nowhere to win an Oscar for writing ''Good Will Hunting,'' their first and so far last script together. Lo (the line about Latin women has been added since the Fringe performances), it's the Legend that is central to the play. 122 in the East Village) had its premiere a year ago at the New York International Fringe Festival, at the very moment when the Ben and Jen Show was about to overshadow the Legend of Matt and Ben. The play shrewdly connects to its audience by tapping into our encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, the women who wrote the play and also appear as Ben and Matt, turn celebrity overload to their advantage, embracing our shared image of the actors - Matt is the smart one, Ben is cute but dumb - even as they send up the embarrassing amount of trivia we carry around about movie stars. ''I like Latin women.'' The line gets a huge, easy laugh because we are all saturated with too much information about the couple sometimes known as Bennifer. ''I'm going to meet Daisy Fuentes,'' he says. Lo, Jenny, Jen -the inescapable image of Jennifer Lopez hovers over the clever Off Off Broadway satire ''Matt & Ben.'' Set in 1995, when Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were struggling actors, the play has Ben fantasize about being famous. ALTHOUGH her name is not mentioned in any of its forms - J.
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