A bad four-hour production of Long Day’s Journey into Night — now that’s Heartbreak Hill. The annual Boston Theater Marathon, though it boasts almost as many participants as that other marathon, is more an enjoyable series of sprints: 45 short plays performed by 46 theater companies on two stages at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (all of it presided over by BPT artistic director Kate Snodgrass) over the course of 10 hours. An SRO crowd took in all or part of this year’s April 13 event, the proceeds adding up to more than $18,000 to benefit the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund. We at the Phoenix admit we’re not marathoners; we " embedded " a relay team to report on the best of the bunch.

FROM NOON TO 4

One of the early leaders in this year’s marathon, Michael Hammond’s The Great Audience Rebellion (Shakespeare & Company), begins with the reading of a proclamation by that " much maligned but paradoxically sought after " entity, the American theater audience, that it quits. The rest of the witty 10-minute piece consists of a crass, funny conversation between producer Funkhauser (Joe Pacheco) and playwright Bell (Jason Asprey) concerning whether artist or moneyman should stage his own suicide to get the viewers back. To judge by the enthusiastic crowd at the marathon, no such extreme measures are necessary. Still, it’s nice to know they care.

Audience insurrection proved a more rarefied subject than generational conflict. What varied was whether the older or younger contingent is less corrupt. In Alan Brody’s Eckstein & Sons (Underground Railway Theater), a Jewish tailor debates with the grandson who now runs the family business over whether opportunistic growth or a " spotless reputation " is the key to success. In Dana Yeaton’s breezily disturbing The Ten-Minute Dad (Pilgrim Theatre), a lawn-watering middle-aged man finds himself with a son who has abruptly enlisted in the Army and only 10 minutes in which to instruct him (mostly by show-and-tell) in the violent male way of the world.

Robert Brustein’s Noise (American Repertory Theatre) is set in the early 1940s in an apartment on West End Avenue, the scene of a musical debate in which a father and his younger son argue the suave predictability of Guy Lombardo versus the improvisation of Artie Shaw. The war-troubled old man (a brooding Will LeBow) is particularly irked when Russian émigré Sergei Rachmaninov, who lives directly below, starts playing his " funeral music, " which in the old man’s estimation is worse than the " noise " of big-band jazz.

In Shawn Sturnick’s well developed one-joke A Closet Flung Wide Ope’ (Worcester Foothills Theatre Company), a young man bravely, gently comes out first to his concerned mom and then to his hostile dad as — a poet. The ironic parallels, though predictable, are nicely handled, as is the way in which the son’s escalating rhyming talk ( " Poets have endurance/Look at Wallace Stevens, seller of insurance " ) proves contagious.

Although there were better roles for men than for women in the early hours of the marathon, moms do get pride of place in Israel Horovitz’s ambitious A Mother’s Love (Gloucester Stage Company & Barefoot Theatre Troupe). The piece contrasts a trio of American women’s angry reactions to government-imposed war with the ritual preparation of a young Arab man for the suicide bombing of a Jewish school. AnaMaria Correa eloquently conveyed the conflict between the title emotion and the religious party line that martyrdom is something to be " achieved. "

Best candidate for a play to be expanded is Kathleen Rogers’s Ballast (Wellesley Summer Theatre), which was powerfully acted by Derry Woodhouse and Susan McConnell. An emotional confrontation between an Irish man and wife who have lost a daughter, the play folds all of Ireland’s tragic history (the subject of a school project of the slain child) into a personal tragedy.

Comedy lends itself to the sketch format, as Zachary L. Shrier’s So Fine Dining (Portland Stage Company) demonstrates. An increasingly intense interview for a sous-chef position (hilariously enacted by David Timm and a seething Tony Correia), it’s the culinary equivalent of phone sex that eventually drops the phone. And David Valdes Greenwood’s Dream of Jeannie By-the-Door (Out of the Blue Theatre) depicts a casino encounter between a newly married couple and a chatty old lady for whom gambling is both an addiction and an outlet. The play is amusing, but it was made more so by the concentrated performance of Karen Woodward Massey cranking the slots in desperation and a wilting wedding dress.

— Carolyn Clay

FROM 4 TO 7

Relationships gone sour — at times to a point of hostility — led the pack in this leg of the race. It began with Jerry Bisantz’s Sex Education (Playwrights’ Platform), in which a pre-adolescent boy learns of his parents’ curdled marriage the hard way. Just when Nick Andrews’s awkwardly mischievous Ben thinks he can’t be more " weirded out " than by sneaking around his folks’ bedroom with his pal, swiggin’ Miller Lite and slobbering over Dad’s stash of Playboys, in walks an uneasy Dad with a frisky co-worker. Given Nancy Curran Willis’s taut direction, few words are needed for Ben to communicate that what he witnesses in minutes could take a lifetime to sort out.

A grown daughter is equally weirded out by her mother’s young boyfriend in Greg Lam’s Happy Daughter (Raven Theatrical). In this humorous contemplation of the not-so-secret sex lives of parents, it’s the mother-child bond that’s on the fritz. Characters seemingly cut from Christopher Durang’s dramatic cloth are plunked down in Sam Shepard’s sordid Midwest. Rife with riffs on Asian-American culture, and played for appropriately kitschy effect under Kevin Fennessy’s direction, this clever reversal of the parent-letting-go theme was narrated by Bernice Sim’s smart, sad Carol as she comes to grips with how Mom’s brawny, brainless beau has saved Mom from all the stereotypes of " divorced, middle-aged, Asian mothers. "

A mother’s point of view comes into sharp focus in Margaret Broucek’s Your Better Butch Fashion (Lyric Stage Company). Spiro Veloudos directed Sheila Stasack in the satirical monologue recounting the extremes a New Yawk Jewish mother goes to to protect her lesbian daughter’s best interests. In her alternately effervescent and exasperated telling of a jaunt to a seedy " women’s club " to find her daughter an eligible doctor, Stasack made this shtick figure a deliberately overdrawn, animated caricature.

Patrick Cleary pulls off a slick narrative twist in Hit Me (SpeakEasy Stage Company). Sulking like Hamlet on dope amid greasy pizza boxes and empty bottles, Tommy Day Carey’s Jimmy called on his brother for what seems like a ritual beating. Adam R. Perlman directed what turns brutal in stunningly choreographed, over-the-top fashion. Only in the final moment did we learn why Jimmy demands punishment.

Amid all the decaying relations, nostalgic tenderness was displayed in Skateboards (Nora Theatre Company), Norman Lasca’s Albee-esque snapshot of another day spent on a park bench by an elderly couple grumbling about the demise of youth culture. But when the pair take a spin on a skateboard, a symbol of modern delinquency, it evokes the carefree way things were for them.

Layers of societal troubles are nimbly exposed in Paula J. Caplan’s The Test (New African Company). Beneath its surface story of the friendship between two death-row inmates lies a sly, affecting statement on high-stakes standardized testing and the emotional costs of racial pigeonholing.

— Liza Weisstuch

FROM 7 TO 10

The most adroit of the 10-minute plays of the marathon’s final hours combined sharp character vignettes with a punch line, the exception being Linda Button’s Holler Song (Emerson Stage). Set on the T, this playlet is a vocalized collage generated by an octet of commuters. The beeps and rhythms from the various cell phones provide the percussion; they’re augmented by a guy wearing earphones and hammering out the beat in his head on the back of a seat. Skillfully conducted by director Johnmichael Rossi, Holler Song is an aural fabric woven from the strands of each rider’s wackiness.

Glen Doyle’s Date Night (C. Walsh Theatre) takes off on the mating game, employing the set-up of a speed-dating encounter in which the women — seven of them — have five minutes to meet the man of their dreams before moving on to another prey. The playwright cast himself as the lone man; he was cleverly concealed until the first whistle.

Jon Lipsky, who wrote and directed Girl in the Basement (Vineyard Playhouse), found he could establish characters and describe their relationship through the music of two folk roadies at a pair of mikes in a sound studio where they’re laying down tracks for an album. The pair’s complicated bond is revealed through their songs, especially here by the eloquent Jordan Dann as Queen of Wyoming.

Joshua Scher’s Flushed (Next Stages) is a jokelet that succeeded by the audacity of its premise — a man gets his arm stuck in a toilet trying to retrieve a diamond ring — and a fine performance by Stacy Fischer as the cleaning lady who finds him. Scher packs an evening’s worth of exposition into the time frame but manages to extract both the limb and a satisfying if unsurprising wrap by the blackout.

The navel gazing so beloved by show folks fuels a tiny revelation scene by Theresa Rebeck called The Actress (Huntington Theatre Company). Scott Edmiston directed Robert Pemberton and Judith McIntyre as two wanna-be actors who’ve taken a beach weekend to relax. But the profession, out of sight, is never out of mind. McIntyre delivered a heartbreaker of a performance wrapped around Rebeck’s sensitive characterization of an artist.

Jeffrey Mousseau directed Karen MacDonald in one of John Kuntz’s oddball vignettes, Smurf (Coyote Theatre Company). MacDonald portrayed an 82-year-old cat fancier with all the quirks that image conjures up. Her unexpected skill as a stand-up comedian (here seated in a comfy chair) allowed her to negotiate the clichés and the tone change at the climax.

Best of show for this viewer was Ronan Noone’s Amereka (Súgán Theatre Company), a monologue directed by Carmel O’Reilly and performed by Richard McElvain. The Man, a recent citizen of the United States who immigrated 10 years earlier, tells a simple story that encapsulates his love of the new country despite the problems personified by an off-stage teenage hoodlum. Ten minutes was all that was needed to remind us of the worth of both McElvain and Noone.

— Iris Fanger