Chicago TheatreWorks, at the Organic Theater Company Greenhouse, South Hall.
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Some playwrights seem to have difficulty remembering that they’re writing for the live stage, not for the television studio. John L. Wood’s two new full-length plays, both being produced by Chicago TheatreWorks, are full of the manufactured improbabilities and facile plot devices that network producers slobber over. In The Santa Anas a downtrodden class-conscious Latino kid gets caught burglarizing the sumptuous home of a Zen-spouting, suicidal Hollywood hack. In All Judy’s Men Leave a frenetic English professor who believes that he’s Judy Garland and his live-in “immersion therapist” end up in virtual lockdown with a self-loathing, fundamentalist AWOL gay sailor with incontrovertible proof that the world is about to end.
