By Kristen Nevarez Schweizer

April 2, 2026

When a press release features a Carlsbad theater showing two Latinas playing Boston-born actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in a comedy co-written by Mindy Kaling, I stop everything to read it because none of these things should go together.

Here’s the premise: before Good Will Hunting made them household names, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were just two Boston guys with big dreams. In this wildly fictional “origin story,” the screenplay literally falls from the sky into their apartment, and the two wrestle with destiny, creative insecurity, and the seductive cusp of fame.

What strengthens the intrigue is Mindy Kaling wrote and originally starred in this play. Yes, that Mindy Kaling. Before The Office, before The Mindy Project, before she became one of Hollywood’s most reliably funny females, a younger, hungrier Kaling co-wrote Matt & Ben with Brenda Withers in 2002. The then-unknown women performed it at the New York International Fringe Festival and surprised everyone by winning the “Best in Fringe” award. Even wilder, the Time Magazine critic Richard Zoglin named it among his top five productions of 2003.

Previews of New Village Arts’ regional premiere of Matt & Ben begin March 27th, before it opens April 4 and runs through April 26th, which is hopefully long enough for the inevitable word-of-mouth buzz to draw the crowds this script deserves.

On the local front, this production is directed by Dr. Maria Patrice Amon. Long, long ago, I met Amon at an event by Amigo’s del REP at The San Diego Repertory Theatre, when the National City native glided in, holding both a doctorate in drama and a law degree. Since then, she has co-founded TuYo Theatre — a Latinx theatre company — and has been the driving force behind the Latinx New Play Festival, now in its eighth year of partnership with La Jolla Playhouse. She’s directed everywhere from Urbanite Theatre to Passage Theatre to Diversionary, and this is her NVA main stage debut as this season’s Dea Hurston Professional Fellow.

“In our production of Matt & Ben, two brilliant women of color inhabit the roles of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck to playfully remix the myth of the Hollywood boy genius. Using these familiar icons as a lens, we will approach this sharp comedy as an exploration of who gets access to success, recognition, and creative power,” says Amon. “The result will be a funny, irreverent staging that invites audiences to laugh while reconsidering the stories we tell about genius — and who gets to claim it.”

I expect a lot of feminist, intellectual horsepower underneath what is, at its core, a fast-paced comedy about two white boys freaking out in a Boston apartment.

Matt & Ben runs March 27–April 26 at New Village Arts, 2787 State Street, Carlsbad. Tickets at newvillagearts.org.