Some people think Neil LaBute should write only one-acts and its easy to see why. His lean, economical dialogue is usually built around a savvy concept that can stretch thin by the second hour of a full-length play. But Mr. LaBute, who polarizes critics like few other playwrights, excels at shorthand, as demonstrated by The Great War, a bruising, comically nasty portrait of a broken marriage directed by Andrew McCarthy. Call it Virginia Woolf Lite.

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Jen Maufrais/Ensemble Studio Theater

Laila Robins and Grant Shaud in The Great War.

Jen Maufrais/Ensemble Studio Theater

Gio Perez and Amelia McClain in October/November.

The husband (Grant Shaud) is a classic LaBute type: ineffectual, weak, allergic to risk. Hes no match for his ice queen of a wife (the devilishly delightful Laila Robins), whose take on love you wont find in Hallmark cards.

You work and work and one day youve done it, dream come true, she says. You despise the person you said youd love. Detest them. Its evolution, baby.

Balancing the bile of The Great War in Series B, the lively, diverse second installment of Marathon 2008 at the Ensemble Studio Theater, is the sweet coming-of-age drama October/November by Anne Washburn, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, who collaborated on her play The Internationalist. Set on an outdoor bench, this modest romance is about the relationship between the quiet 13-year-old David (Gio Perez) and the 16-year-old Rachel (Amelia McClain), who mentors him in the ways of the world. In the most memorable monologue David struggles with a universal problem of kids on the verge of adulthood: When do you stop dressing up for Halloween?

Of the five shows, theres only one real misfire: the endless high school prom melodrama Okay, which is presented last. Lloyd Suhs moving Happy Birthday William Abernathy is little more than an old mans confession of a shameful incident from his past, but Joe Ponazecki performs it with conviction.

The same could be said of the cast of the goofy comedy Ideogram, which plays off the appealing idea that we all might have secret talents. It begins with an absurd concept: Every time an otherwise ordinary man doodles on paper, he writes beautiful Chinese literature, even though he doesnt speak the language. It then spins into a thriller. No one would write an entire play about this. But a one-act? Why not?