The Best Plays

These are the plays which in the light of metropolitan criticism seem most important:

PEER GYNT--" Down the vast edges drear" of a hard-hearted world Ibsen leads his epic hero on the futile quest of the meaning of lite. Peer, the boaster, the seeker of self-realization and the victim of a relentless wanderlust, is played by Joseph Schildkraut. Lee Simonson's settings are eerily effective.

ROMEO AND JULIET--Old Verona revived by Jane Cowl and Rollo Peters to the complete satisfaction of critical New York. Proving that bhakespeare was not only an immortal artist but an experienced and practical man of the theatre.

MERTON OF THE MOVIES--Glenn Hunter as a movie-struck youth, whose loftiest screen ambitions turn out to be gall and Hollywood. A skillful satire on the eighth art, in which unconscious comedy proves to be the essence of pathos.

RAIN--A scathing exposure of militant Christianity in the South beas, in which Jeanne Eagels gives the most convincing portrait of a hard-boiled lady of the pavement since Pauline Lord's Anna Christie.

SEVENTH HEAVEN--A long snake whip and a rendering of La Marseillaise off-stage are the emotional assistants to Helen Menken in a skillfully concocted assembly of Parisian eccentricities.

KIKI--Lenore Ulrich entering the last lap in her long career as the naughty little grisette who wasn't such a bad girl after all. Belasco hokum at its best.

THE ADDING MACHINE--Expressiomstic projection of an humble Babbitt called Mr. Zero. A satirical arraignment of bourgeois justice by Elmer Rice, who has graduated to the Theatre Guild from a successful Broadway novitiate.

YOU AND I--The best cast in town in the " Harvard Prize Play," by Philip J. Q. Barry, a young man still in his twenties. Clever dialogue and penetrating observations of marriage, manners and the younger generation.

POLLY PREFERRED -- Genevieve Tobin appears in a comedy with a perfect first act. A go-getter, finding a pretty girl stranded in the Automat, makes a movie star and finally a wife out of her. A burlesque director furnishes most of the laughs.

THE LAST WARNING -- Seventh month of this super-thriller, in which the audience is locked in the theatre and "policemen" are stationed at all the exits. Old men with high blood pressures keep away.