THEATER REVIEW: "After the Fall" ★★½ Through Aug. 22 at the Greenhouse Theatre Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes; Tickets: $25 at 773-404-7336 or www.eclipsetheatre.com

Somewhere in the third hour of the Eclipse Theatre production of “After the Fall,” somewhere amidst the cries of “Love me!” and “Give me the pills!,” director Steve Scott's production starts to wilt like a punching bag that has undergone one too many painful blows.

That relentless last hour, that unexpurgated portrait of Maggie (an alter ego for Marilyn Monroe) needing, demanding, loving, and Quentin (a stand-in for the author) inexorably realizing that he was ill-equipped to give her the tools to prevent her self-destruction, is why this 1964 Arthur Miller play, this most nakedly personal of Miller's plays, is so fiendishly difficulty to produce.

And the disappointment you feel as this fluid, tempestuous show unravels is actually testimony to richness of the first two hours — of a very craftful production that somehow manages to cram 15 actors and a lifetime of authorial contemplation and regret into a tiny studio theater on Lincoln Avenue.

You find yourself sitting bolt upright, thinking about how difficult it really was for the intellectual denizens of the fractured middle of the 20th century to actually be happy.

Oh the crises, the cataclysms, the distractions! Sex. Communism. McCarthyism. No wonder Quentin is reduced to statements like “I don't sleep with other woman, but I think I behave as though I do.” He couldn't keep his head straight.

THEATER REVIEW: "Earth: TTFN" ½ star Through Aug. 9 at Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.; Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes; Tickets: $24-$30 at 773-404-7336.

Any time you find yourself at a show where the script is written by someone—or something—called “The Chronicler,” you should anticipate trouble. But nothing could adequately prepare you for the amateurish incompetence that permeates “Earth: TTFN,” the ill-founded, ill-prepared and thorough pathetic new show at the Greenhouse Theater Center in Lincoln Park.

This noxious, witless attraction is the brainchild of producers Bill and Wendy Spatz, the couple who purchased the Greenhouse last year from the Victory Gardens. We are all entitled to our flops, but this waste of time is belly-flopping in the former home of the Body Politic Theatre, hallowed ground as far as I am concerned, and since the Spatzs now own the joint, they should have more dignity.

THEATER REVIEW: "Tomorrow Morning" (★★★ 1/2) Through Dec. 7 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes; Tickets: $28.50-$34.50 at 773-404-7336 and www.tomorrowmorningthemusical.com. Starring Emily Thompson and Michael Mahler.

Laurence Mark Wythe, the hugely talented author of “Tomorrow Morning,” is a young British composer who doesn’t hang around trendy New York musical-development circles. Thank god. Somebody would have warned him against writing a sentimental romantic musical centered on one couple marrying and one getting divorced.

“It has been done,” he’d have been told. Too obvious. Too much like “The Last Five Years” or “Baby.” Not enough pizazz. Not enough cynicism. Insufficiently urban. Insufficiently atonal. Insufficiently arch. And they’d have been completely wrong.

Life as it is lived—and marriage as it is experienced—follows predictable trajectories of happiness and melancholy. The intensity of yearning to do right by a child isn’t diminished by the commonality of the emotion. And the dreams and fears of a bride and groom don’t go away just because the pair down the block are worrying about all the same stuff.