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Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who's passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He's particularly troubled by his parents' divorce. At his mother's urging, he agrees to clean the attic of an elderly neighbor, Miss Young, for ten dollars. There he finds a rare baseball card, the T-206 Honus Wagner, which is worth well over two million dollars. Round about here, the dialogue starts to sound like an instructive after-school special — and director John Ashton doesn't seem to have decided if he's producing children's theater or something for adults. Should Joey return the card to Miss Young, which his mother insists is the honorable thing to do? Or should he sell the card, ending his family's financial struggles and — as he desperately hopes — reuniting his mother and father? All these characters, with the exception of Joey himself, are cardboard figures, and the plot, too, is simplistic. But things get more interesting when we discover that there's quite a bit more to the Honus Wagner baseball card than its monetary value. Wagner himself suddenly pops up in Joey's bedroom, and later helps the boy move backward in time to witness the 1909 World Series. Presented by the Aurora Fox through July 20, 9900 East Colfax Avenue, Aurora, 303-739-1970, www.aurorafox.org.

Matt and Ben. Authors Brenda Withers and Mindy Kaling were classmates of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's at Dartmouth, and they were apparently very, very jealous. So jealous that they wrote a play in which Matt and Ben, played by Kaling and Withers themselves in New York, were revealed as dumb and untalented dopes who hadn't, in fact, written Good Will Hunting at all. The script simply fell from the ceiling of Ben's grubby apartment as the actors wrestled with an entirely different creative project: a screen adaptation of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. There's just about enough material in the guys' wrangling and reminiscing to sustain a ten-minute Saturday Night Live skit — but unfortunately, Matt and Ben goes on for over 75 minutes. The action is punctuated by two visitations: one from Gwyneth Paltrow and one from J.D. Salinger. Gwyneth drifts around, ecstatically licking the icing from a stray cupcake and dispensing advice on success to Matt, pausing only to admire a photograph of Ben. This scene at least genuflects to what we know — or think we do — about the real-life actress, but the Salinger bit is just plain weird. At least this production offers an almost perfect object lesson in two disparate styles of acting. You can tell that Laura Norman, who plays Ben, has imagined her way into the role. If Missy Moore had made Matt as specific, the evening might have worked — but Moore just lowers her voice and walks in a vaguely male way, and while she's sometimes funny and effective, the stereotype eventually wears as thin as the script. Presented by Miners Alley Playhouse through July 20, 1224 Washington Street, Golden, 303-935-3044, www.minersalley.com. Reviewed June 12.