Best Plays in Manhattan

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

SERIOUS COQUETTE--People scatter tears throughout the auditorium as Helen Hayes shows how a flirt may break her heart.

MAX REINHARDT'S SEASON--Spectacular importations from Berlin and Vienna given in German.

CIVIC REPERTORY THEATRE--Eva LeGallienne's able troupe giving good plays for minor prices.

PORGY--In the negro district of Charleston murder is committed.

MELODRAMA

THE RACKET--A cruel tale of Chicago police stations written and played with stern reality.

INTERFERENCE--In London murder is garnished with glossy epigram.

THE TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN--A Follies girl is saved on her way to the electric chair.

BROADWAY--Gangsters' guns point at the dancing feet of Manhattan cabarets.

FUNNY

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW--Old Shakespeare brightened up with modern clothes, carpet sweepers, and a motor car.

BURLESQUE--In dingy burlesque theatre wisdom, tears, laughter.

THE COMMAND TO LOVE--To love of country are added other kinds of love.

THE SHANNONS OF BROADWAY--A slang investigation of hotel management in small towns.

THE ROAD TO ROME--Rome trembles as Hannibal comes, sees a lovely Roman, and is conquered.

THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA -- The Theatre Guild offers a glittering revival of Bernard Shaw.

MUSICAL

Deep thinkers depend on A Connecticut Yankee, Manhattan Mary, The Mikado, Good News, Hit the Deck, Funny Face.

New Plays in Manhattan

What Do We Know? The ornate Olga Petrova sat down and wrote a play about spiritualism; got up and acted it. There was some perplexity in the audience as to whether she was for or against it. Finally her attitude seemed favorable. By that time it didn't matter much.

The Love Nest. Readers of Life and Lardner crowded eagerly forward to applaud a play compounded from the brains of the combination. Robert Emmet Sherwood, lank scrivener from Harvard who edits Life, dramatized Ring W. Lardner's fine short story The Love Nest. Capable June Walker was cast for the lead. Hopes high before the play subsided at the curtain. The piece remained a fine short story, all of which was crowded into the second act. A first act and a last were pasted on to make an evening of it. Mr. Sherwood's knowledge of the cinema industry gleaned in many years of movie criticism was agreeably available for realistic detail. The play showed a picture director's wife with sweetness & light, ideal sweetheart in the gushing fan magazine tales. Distracted by hollow Hollywood around her she drank herself into a lump every night with her butler. Miss Walker portrayed this unreliable beauty, with all reliability, while the performance of one Paula Trueman, fluttering birdlike through the evening as a maple syrup movie critic, was a minor masterpiece.

Spring Song. Four actors gave last week a four-act, feeble play. They showed how an artist fled a small town wife; rambled happily about Paris with a mistress and her checkbook; became a famed sculptor; returned to U. S. and the security of wedlock. Three quarters of this was badly acted, the good performance emanating from Leo Bulgakov who came this way some seasons back with the able actors of Moscow Art Theatre.

Juno and the Paycock was the second* play of Sean O'Casey, Dublin hodcarrier. Triumphantly disclosed overseas, it was two seasons ago seized by a troupe of ineffectual and its magic shattered by shoddy playing in a Manhattan theatre. A tender, tumultuous tragedy, sharp in the early acts with vivid laughter, repaid the faithful who last week returned to see a fine play rise from the ashes of an early disappointment. It was given as the second item in the repertory of the Irish Players, imported from Dublin. Telling a tale of a crazyquilt Irish family who live in the gilded illusion of a legacy the play shuns politics until the final, tragic act. Again critics carped at bad direction, lighting, mechanics which have become things to take for granted among the sound producers hereabouts. Rapturously they cried the praises of O'Casey's poetry, his curiosities, of character; the acting of the troupe which had its manuscript from his own hands.

Los Angeles. There was a hard hearted melodrama called Chicago that was excellent; a vapid imitation called New York. A third, named for the cinema capital, arrives to rest between the two. It is deftly hard hearted; and sweetened to taste. Written to no purpose except to amuse, it is fairly amusing.

The play opens in the ladies' room. Harpies, old and young, plot to invade Hollywood and bewilder some giddy actor into intemperate diversions. Then they propose to precipitate a scandal that the magnates will wish to wipe hastily away with gifts of money. The name of the movie industry is sacred, and must be preserved. But our impractical young harpy falls violently in love with the actor involved.

Big Alison Skipworth is reliably funny as our old harpy. One Mary Robinson enacts as tough a creature as is permissible without frightening the audience. Donald Ogden Stewart, author of mad literature, writes herein his first lines for the stage and rouses occasional uproar.

Tod. Max Reinhardt, German, continued to reveal his repertory at the massive Century Theatre. Again he showed himself the magic master of mass formations on the stage. The crowded fury of tattered Paris in the Revolution came clamoring to life as Danton was tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal which he had founded and as he rode to the guillotine. The rest of the play was sluggish. In German, language of the presentation, Tod means Death.

Caste. Cosmo Hamilton, brother of famed Journalist-Novelist Sir Philip Gibbs and of Novelist A. Hamilton Gibbs, also writes books and plays over which the giddy serving maid may smack her lips. His are Michael Arlen's people done in the more obvious, juicy manner of a movie scenario. Even when he has a problem which presumably he feels to be formidable, he must deal with it in cream phrases. His problem is intermarriage between an estimable Jew and a female of the higher social register. Her family are aghast in the grand manner, and the scenes are laid in such living-quarters as a villa in Fiesole, morning room in Mr. Farquhar's house, Park Avenue; the Duchess de Bercy's house, Avenue de Bois de Boulogne. All this is so fearful that one is apt to forget that an exceedingly fine company of actors is displaying a theatrically adroit and often moving play.

Playing the Game. It might be natural for spectators to suppose that the game referred to in the title is none other than the old-fashioned badger game. But in the midst of the machinations the girl-crook decides that, however profitable it may be, the badger game isn't cricket. Unaccountably, she has fallen in love with the husband whom she had married for profit. In the last act she turns her dishonest companions over to the police, recaptures from them some of the money she has hornswoggled out of her husband, and prepares for a legitimate honeymoon. As a bad badger player, Irene Homer is a capable actress, but the play palls.

*The Shadow of a Gunman was O'Casey's first play; The Plough and the Star, his third.