The battle between Neil LaBute's boy-men and the women who put up with them rages on in Reasons To Be Pretty, the playwright's first script to hit Broadway -- and, for GableStage, the first resounding success of the new South Florida theater season.

That's not meant to diminish the admirable, hugely challenging production of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll that kicked off the season at Plantation's Mosaic Theatre last month. It is simply a truth that LaBute's work is far more accessible and, especially for younger audiences, more resonant. And under Joseph Adler's intelligently textured direction, a sizzling GableStage cast is serving up take-no-prisoners LaBute.

The third in a loose trilogy of plays about the toxicity of our societal obsession with appearance, Reasons To Be Pretty begins in the middle of a blazing fight between a young hairdresser named Steph (Erin Joy Schmidt) and her bookish boyfriend Greg (Ricky Waugh).

Greg, it seems, was shooting the breeze with his buddy Kent (Todd Allen Durkin), who was going on and on about a new hottie at the warehouse where they work. Greg's sin? He described Steph's face as ``regular'' (as opposed to hot chick's smokin' looks) and was overheard by Kent's pretty wife Carly (Amy Elane Anderson), who practically left skid marks on the kitchen floor racing to her phone to snitch to Steph. Hence, the verbal death match.

Kent and Carly have troubles of their own. He's a player who doesn't let a little thing like being married stand in the way of his new-gal pursuit, despite the inconvenient fact that Carly also works at the warehouse, as a security guard. And she soon has reason to feel more insecure than ever about her wandering hubby.

Reasons To Be Pretty is both artfully crafted and emotionally raw. Steph's deep well of insecurity has at least as much to do with the demise of her relationship as Greg's unwillingness -- or inability -- to commit. Carly's hesitancy about trusting her intuition is both self-preserving and self-destructive. Kent is simply one more brash, funny, repulsive LaBute guy who never got past the ``I want'' stage of childhood.

All four actors fully and convincingly inhabit their characters. Though Greg is both stuck and drifting through life, Waugh registers the thoughts and emotional jolts that will take him to a new place. Schmidt conveys Steph's torrents of rage physically. Anderson (who doesn't wear a wedding ring, though Carly would) finds Carly's empathetic vulnerability. And Durkin plays Kent's piggishness with pedal-to-the-metal glee.

The fine design work -- by Lyle Baskin (set), Jeff Quinn (lighting), Matt Corey (music and sound) and Ellis Tillman (costumes) -- easily takes us into the characters' blue-collar world, though LaBute fleetingly struggles with making their modest education convincing. (Carly, for instance, doesn't know who Edgar Allan Poe is. Really? The mack daddy of all horror writers 'til Stephen King came along?)

Tiny quibbles aside, Reasons To Be Pretty is one wild, engrossing ride that twists and turns exactly as LaBute intended, thanks to Adler and his killer cast.

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.

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