Pronounce it ‘giggly’

Ben AFFLECK can’t stop complaining.

Not about the anemic box-office returns of “Gigli.” Not about his on-again, off-again marriage to Jennifer Lopez. This time, the young actor, strangely impersonating Gwyneth Paltrow, is railing against Brad Pitt and David Schwimmer. Pitt, he says, can’t read, and Schwimmer can’t act. And Affleck’s supposed best friend for life, Matt Damon? Well, he’s a lying ingrate.

A tell-all interview in US Weekly? Secretly recorded conversations from a Vancouver strip club? No, Affleck’s barbs come from the phenomenally popular play “Matt & Ben,” a new satire playing at a 100-seat theater in New York’s East Village.

The creation of two recent Dartmouth drama grads, “Matt & Ben” is the theatrical perfect storm of three intersecting fronts. Firstly, the play arrives just as celebrity culture has reached, depending on your outlook, its apex or nadir (see: California’s gubernatorial election). Secondly, the show has at its center the current poster child of tabloid excess. Finally, the play has an irresistible marketing hook: Affleck and Damon are both played by women.

Clocking in at barely a few minutes over an hour, “Matt & Ben” is deceptively simple. The setting is Affleck’s unadorned Massachusetts apartment living room, the year 1995. Neither Affleck nor Damon is yet a star. In fact, the two are struggling screenwriters, and as the story opens they are adapting -- “transcribing” is the more fitting word -- J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” But just as the play begins, a gift literally falls from the sky: the completed script for “Good Will Hunting.”

Is it a sign from God? Playwrights and actors Mindy Kaling (who plays Affleck) and Brenda Withers (Damon) are less interested in questions of divine intervention than in exploring how the comfort of old friendships can be tested by the prospect of quick fame.

The play’s Damon is tempted to present “Good Will Hunting” as the pair’s own work, even though they haven’t yet written a word of it. After all, it’s a really good script, a perfect Hollywood calling card. “It’s brilliant, it’s got a part for you -- it’s complete,” Damon says. “Who thinks the smart choice is wasting the day eating junk food, copying down some lines from an old book, committing plagiarism?”

Well, Affleck does. And that’s basically the whole play, outside of whimsical visits from Paltrow and Salinger. In debating their ethical options, the longtime pals realize that maybe they’re not such a perfect pair after all.

“What the play is about actually has nothing to do with ‘Bennifer,’ ” says Stephen Pevner, the show’s producer. “It’s really about two people who just need to get along.”

Damon is pragmatic and secretive, an overly serious artist who views his buddy as a dilettante. As the play has it, Affleck is indeed a barely literate frat-house goof.

If the two are going to win the Academy Award in 1998 for writing “Good Will Hunting,” they must resolve their differences before the curtain falls.

Started out as a lark

Kaling, 24, and Withers, 25, didn’t spend months in libraries researching Affleck and Damon’s life stories. “We wanted to free ourselves up,” Kaling says. “If we knew the truth, it would be a little hard to make it up, which is more fun for us.”

Even “Matt & Ben’s” seemingly real incidents -- Affleck’s mockingly accompanying Damon in a high school talent show performance of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” -- are invented. The young women also don’t try very hard to look like guys, and they bear no resemblance to the personalities they are depicting. The tall Affleck is played by the diminutive Kaling, and the short Damon is played by the lanky Withers.

The pair, who met in Dartmouth’s campus singing group the Rockapellas, conjured the play while killing time in Withers’ brother’s apartment after they graduated. At first, the play seemed little more than a lark. Then the duo performed scenes for friends and family. The verdict: Maybe it was, in fact, just a lark.

“One of our friends said, ‘I think it is really strange and I don’t know if people are going to buy it,’ ” Kaling says. “But I was so attached to my Ben character that I thought the world had to see it.”

The women certainly benefited from great timing. The play debuted last year at New York’s International Fringe Festival, and Kaling and Withers then took the show to February’s U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. The play opened at the P.S. 122 performance space in August and is selling out most of its nine weekly performances.

As Kaling and Withers refined the script, their subject matter became only more opportune. While Damon certainly has faded from the spotlight (he stars in December’s comedy “Stuck on You” with Greg Kinnear), Affleck’s every sneeze has been front-page tabloid news.

“At any given time, Ben somehow manages to be on the cover of every magazine,” Withers says. “Last year during the Fringe, Ben was doing ‘Daredevil’ promotions. And people say, ‘What timing! How did you do this?’ How did you plan it?’ We are just thankful that he has a scandalous life.

“This is a pretty topical play, and it crosses over into pop culture. So we expected it to pull from a different demographic. But never again are we going to be in a play when we are in People magazine. Because plays do not get into People magazine. What we learned in this saga is that there is no such thing as bad publicity.”

The only nod to new developments is this bit of dialogue.

Ben: I’m gonna meet Daisy Fuentes!

Matt: Daisy Fuentes?

Ben: I like Latin women.

In a way, though, Affleck’s unrelenting media attention may have unfairly influenced “Matt & Ben’s” audience expectations.

“When we first did this, nobody was making jokes on late-night TV shows” about Affleck and Lopez, Kaling says. “There wasn’t this whole thing of anybody getting fed up with Ben Affleck. Which is different now. And unfortunately, I think it colors the way that some people perceive [the play]: ‘Let’s go see them be so mean to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon! Because I am personally am so fed up with them, and Ben Affleck in particular.’ ”

In fact, the play ultimately suggests that Damon and Affleck did indeed write the Oscar-winning script. Exactly how, though, is never revealed. “We don’t think it tries to slander either of them,” Kaling says. “In the end, we give them this great compliment, which is that the script of ‘Good Will Hunting’ is so good.”

While Damon and Affleck understandably have not been spotted in “Matt & Ben’s” small theater, an array of celebrities have been, including Nicole Kidman, Steve Martin, Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller.

No fits, no fights

Unlike the subjects of their satire, Kaling and Withers claim to work well together. They have needed to. When they first began work on “Matt & Ben,” the two were not only its writers and stars but also its directors and producers.

“It was sort of tit-for-tat direction: You gave one note and you got one note,” Withers says. “It was all you could do. Because it was pretty taxing.”

Working largely alone, they avoided the fights that befall their onstage characters.

“A lot of [our disagreements] looked like, ‘I’m too lazy to do any work right now. Please stop pressuring me. All I want to do is take a nap and eat snack food,’ ” Kaling says. “And then the other person would have to say, ‘No, no. We have to do this, we have to do this.’ That, more than anything creatively, was more of an obstacle.

“We’re pretty lucky, actually. Because working together, we almost never have disagreements -- where one of us will think of an idea or say, ‘This should happen,’ and it’s very rare that we veto that. I think directing ourselves was the hardest thing.” (The current staging is directed by David Warren.)

There have been a few minor bumps along the way. During the Fringe festival run, the two posted on the Internet a fake cease-and-desist letter from make-believe Damon and Affleck lawyers. They then feared the letter would spark a real lawsuit. “We were terrified the whole time,” Kaling says. “But that’s what you do when you are empowered by your total poverty.”

More recently, in one P.S. 122 performance, a stage punch from Kaling actually connected to Withers’ face, breaking her nose. When they now brawl on stage, Kaling misses Withers by a good foot.

In the coming weeks, the actors and their producers will decide whether the show moves to Los Angeles or Boston or both, meaning, of course, that new actors will have to take over the parts.

“It’s at the point where you think, ‘No. I’m the only person who can play Ben Affleck!’ ” Kaling says. “We feel ownership over these characters, but we also realize, well, I guess they are real people.”

One idea would be to bring “Matt & Ben” to Southern California just before the Academy Awards.

“People have said that if we are going to do it in Los Angeles, the fact that the Oscars are early this year, and capitalizing on the Oscar frenzy, might be a great antidote to the Oscar frenzy,” producer Pevner says.

Unless, of course, people really are sick of Affleck and Damon. Wait. They already are. And that hasn’t hurt the show one bit.