The Best Plays

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

SERIOUS

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN--The story of tramps, many men and one woman, and how the men fought for her and arranged her escape from justice.

WHITE CARGO--Highly thermal happenings in Africa when a white man wilts, morally, in the lonely heat and goes native. THE GREEN HAT--Michael Arlen's ingenious artificialities recaptured in a play chiefly important for the performance of Katharine Cornell.

THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED--Pauline Lord still showing how a waitress may marry an old farmer from loneliness and run into a lot of trouble.

LESS SERIOUS

THE MAN WITH A LOAD OF MISCHIEF--Reviewed in this issue.

EASY COME, EASY GO--Reviewed in this issue.

THE BUTTER AND EGG MAN--A satirical tale of the theatre, heavily buttered with brilliant lines and deftly egged on by the skill of Gregory Kelly.

ARMS AND THE MAN--Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne opening the Theatre Guild's Shaw season with the early anti-war comedy.

THE VORTEX--London society at decadent, amusing, and finally fearfully moving moments. Noel Coward, actor and author.

CRADLE SNATCHERS -- A shifty slice of frank indelicacy, regarding three middle-aged women and three boys, which the masses are crazy to enjoy.

Is ZAT So?--Blunt and caustic argot of the prize ring injected into the seemly quietude of a Fifth Avenue home.

THE POOR NUT--College capers of unauthentic but generously amusing cut.

CRAIG'S WIFE--An intricate and amazingly well played study of a woman to whom love had changed into a deep passion for the ornaments and machinery of her cheerless household.

A MAN'S MAN--A story of desire under the Elevated in which the husband wants to be an Elk and the wife a movie actress--both failing ignominiously.

MUSICAL

Song and dance and damsels are most divertingly combined in the following: Sunny, Louie the 14th, Biff Boy, Artists and Models, The Vagabond King, The Student Prince, Rose Marie, No, No, Nanette.