The Best Plays

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

AREN'T WE ALL--Delightful drawing-room comedy offering Cyril Maude wide scope as a charming old titled rake who parks his brand-new sweeties in the British Museum.

SEVENTH HEAVEN--Up among the Paris chimney pots, Helen Menken suffers to the breaking point the verbal and physical abuse of a shrewish sister. Later she plays the Marseillaise on sister's anatomy with a long black whip and almost everyone but sister is sittin' pretty at the finale.

RAIN--The United States Marines collaborate with Jeanne Eagels (as a lady who isn't no real lady) to ruin the unco guid-ness of a peevishly pious missionary while tropical rain pours down incessantly on the just and the unjust and shivers chase each other on the audience's spine.

ZANDER THE GREAT--Showing that bootleggers will be bootleggers in Arizona as in Harlem--and a little tot can reform any evil character in the American drama, especially when assisted by some gorgeous acting on the part of Alice Brady. Hokum but fun.

ICEBOUND--The frozen hearts of a New England family, honestly and competently, if gloomily, dissected by Owen Davis. The Pulitzer Prize play.

MERTON OF THE MOVIES--Hollywood and its lovely morons spitted upon a rapier of keen satire, in this history of Merton, the grocery-clerk, who dreamed of being an eight-reel-tragic-feature-film and woke to find himself the most popular low comedian in America.

YOU AND I--The clash between love and artistic aspirations repeats itself in father and son. Brilliant American comedy, splendidly cast, with moments of touching irony.

THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE--Early Shaw, revived by the Theatre Guild, and proving that early Shaw is a good deal better than most up-to-the-minute theatricalism. Shaw and Roland Young, as General Burgoyne, make even an English General seem suavely epigrammatic.

WILDFLOWER--Tuneful light opera, featuring Edith Day, apple blossoms, harmonious peasants, the Bambalina and some merry comedy-inserts that have little to do with the plot.

POLLY PREFERRED--The movies are picked on again in an amusing comedy starring Genevieve Tobin.