Photo By James Czar

Elizabeth A. Harris and Molly Binder are Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in a funny fantasy.

If the process of artistic creation intrigues you, you have two chances this summer for a behind-the-scenes peak. A production of Sunday in the Park with George by New Stage Collective (NSC) looks seriously at how French "pointillist" painter Georges Seurat obsessed about the creation of art to the detriment of his personal relationships, while the Know Theatre Tribe offers an amusing take on inspiration, creativity and friendship with Matt & Ben, an imagined back-story about actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck writing the award-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting. Both productions are Cincinnati premieres.

Sunday is a 20-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. It explores how the intellectual Seurat (Charlie Clark) created his masterpiece, "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte," a gigantic painting with two dozen people frozen in a moment in time in 1884 on a park on a Parisian island in the River Seine. Approximately a dozen of them are portrayed, especially Dot (Kera Halbersleben), Seurat's principal subject and sometime lover.

Using fascinating computerized video projections, director Alan Patrick Kenny and designer Pete Thornbury show the painting being worked and assembled. (Seurat sings about "Finishing the Hat" as he seeks the perfect essence of the color and shape of a purple hat Dot wears; he sings the number, in part, to a dog -- who also appears in the painting -- occasionally taking the dog's perspective.) As he creates, his sketches are projected onto drapes suspended from wires like clotheslines, moved to various positions to configure scenes; the squeaky pulley system is a bit distracting, but the concept draws audiences into the process of "Putting It Together," another of the show's memorable musical numbers.

The second act, set in the present, is populated by Seurat's daughter Marie (Halberslaben) and her grandson George (Clark), a conceptual artist. He has lost his way down a blind alley of repetitive creation and project fund-raising. Only by re-connecting with the spirit of his great-grandfather does he find his true path to artistic and personal satisfaction.

Sunday is a daunting work to produce, musically and scenically. Kenny and Thornbury have overcome a major challenge with the aforementioned technology. And NSC's cast sings divinely. What the youthful company has not attained, however, is the maturity required to make Sunday a truly satisfying production: Clark convincingly portrays the driven Seurat and his distracted grandson. Halberslaben is not his match as an actor, bringing less dimension to her two roles. She's acceptable as Dot, but as the elderly Marie, she falls into caricature. That's a problem with the rest of the cast, too: While this story has its amusing characters, they are intended to give greater texture to Seurat's painting, not to be independently humorous. Despite this tendency, the first act finale, when the painting is fully re-created and represented, is electrifying.

That effect fades in the second act when the cast portrays guests at the latter-day George's art reception (cleverly placed in Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center -- where NSC is actually staging Sunday). Suddenly they become flat-out cartoons, which trivializes the artistic process. That undermines Sunday's more serious messages about creativity and passing along inspiration to another generation.

Cartoons were more directly the intention of playwrights Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, who wrote Matt & Ben, a clever pop-culture driven script that has been earning positive marks since its first appearance at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. The playwrights performed the work, paving the way for Cincinnati actresses Elizabeth A. Harris to become Matt Damon and Molly Binder to channel Ben Affleck in the Know Theatre Tribe's production at Gabriel's Corner. Having women play star-quality men might sound far-fetched, but Harris and Binder effectively capture the essence of the odd pair -- Damon is played as an intense intellectual, Affleck as a good-natured slacker. Within 10 minutes the gender issue pretty much evaporates, especially with Binder, who has assembled an array of Affleck-isms that are uncannily on target.

At a moment in time when the two are still unknown bit players, they are cribbing dialogue from J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye for a screenplay, an act of plagiarism making Damon uneasy. Stalled and perhaps ending their friendship (Damon has been cast in a stage production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child, a fact he's hiding from Affleck), they're stopped short by the mysterious arrival (dropping from the ceiling) of a completed screenplay -- for Good Will Hunting -- bearing their names as its screenwriters.

At lot of energy and amusing angst is expended trying to understand how this has happened and what should be done with it. There are fantasy-within-a-fantasy visits from actress Gwyneth Paltrow (Binder in a platinum blonde wig) and reclusive writer J. D. Salinger (Harris wearing a tweed sport coat and eating a pudding cup). The pair read several scenes aloud, trading various roles -- Binder employs a hilarious array of bad accents to Affleck's attempt to read the lines of a British character -- and bickering over who will play Will, the central role. I won't give away the far-fetched contrivance that concludes this humorous fantasy, but it neatly ties the tale back to reality.

Photo By Pete Thornbury

Charlie Clark portrays artists in a multi-media Sunday in the Park with George.

Sometimes we shy away from seeing art being made, as if we were watching sausages being prepared. But with Sunday in the Park and Matt & Ben, it's most entertaining to observe how the creative process can become its own engaging tale. Sunday in the Park with George grade: B; Matt & Ben grade: A-