Theater is a social and collaborative art form, and a playwright’s work is no doubt most fully realized on the stage. But to encounter plays on paper is to encounter them in their platonic form. You’re glued to the playwright’s words, not sitting in Row K jostling for an armrest while gawking at, say, Jane Fonda (who stars in “33 Variations”), wondering if all her years of aerobics paid off. While reading, you can submit more perfectly to the author’s spell and, what’s more, you are your own casting director.

Kenneth Tynan, writing in The New Yorker, once divided the British playwrights of the 1960s into two camps, the “hairy” and the “smooth”  the hairy ones being “embattled” and “socially committed” while the smooth were “cool, apolitical stylists.” As categories go, hairy and smooth are gloriously inexact. But Ms. Reza’s and Mr. LaBute’s plays strike me as the hairy beasts in this foursome; they’re alert, pushy works in which words are hurled like poison darts. Mr. Foote’s and Mr. Kaufman’s are calmer, more self-conscious and a bit less wrigglingly alive, at least on the page.

Ms. Reza is a French playwright and novelist who flings acid dialogue. Her “God of Carnage” is about two 40-something couples who meet to talk things over after one of their sons has clouted the other, knocking out a few of his teeth. This conversation becomes a delightful melee; the couples joust about things from cellphones to miracle drugs to masculinity to Darfur to how to get rid of an unwanted hamster, and it becomes clear that both marriages are hanging by a thread. One character vomits onstage, onto another’s rare art books. A bottle of rum emerges.

The language, in this translation by Christopher Hampton, is fleet and pointed  “Courtesy is a waste of time, it weakens you and undermines you”; “Puking seems to have perked you up”  and Ms. Reza is smart to acknowledge her own verbal facility, which borders on but never crosses over into glibness. (“Do stop shoving these thoughts for the day down our throat,” one character intones.) By the end these excellent characters are, to paraphrase George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” walking what’s left of their scattered, venomous wits.

Image Horton Footes Dividing the Estate, about generations arguing over what to do with the family pile, is a bit too easygoing and familiar. Credit... Peter Kramer/Associated Press

My heart sank when I picked up Neil LaBute’s “reasons to be pretty” and read the miserably corny introduction, which would better fit “High School Musical 4.” (“I hope this play makes a case for being yourself and standing up for what you believe in. For being brave.”) But Mr. LaBute does get one thing right, when he declares, “I’ve written about a lot of men who are really little boys at heart, but Greg, the protagonist in his play, just might be one of the few adults I’ve ever tackled.”

The plot of “reasons to be pretty” sounds like a drunken dinner-party hypothetical: What would you do if your boyfriend was overheard talking about the hot new chick at work while referring to your own face as merely “regular”? Greg’s girlfriend goes ballistic and dumps him, even though he genuinely loves her. “You can’t swallow that down,” she says of his comment, “and find a way to come up smiling or anything, you know what I’m saying?”