The Year's Best

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN. Eugene O'Neill, lovingly and brilliantly assisted by Jason Robards, Colleen Dewhurst and Ed Flanders, brought beauty, power, passion and truth to Broadway.

ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR. A singularly jovial farce. Three suburban British couples party together on three successive Christmas Eves, and the audience gets blind drunk on laughter.

BAD HABITS. Spoofing a pair of zany Dr. Feelgoods, Playwright Terrence McNally proved yet again that he is an antic master of absurdism.

CANDIDE. Harold Prince's agile production pays Voltaire the tribute of unblemished veracity, and Leonard Bernstein's score could well be his passport to musical comedy's Valhalla.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. A triumphant revival of the Tennessee Williams play starring Elizabeth Ashley as a sensuous, febrile, scorchingly Southern Maggie the Cat.

EQUUS. The bizarre saga of a boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike. Galvanically theatrical, albeit specious in substance. The boy (Peter Firth) and his psychiatrist (Anthony Hopkins) give performances in the megaton range.

GOD'S FAVORITE. Neil Simon makes the tribulations of Job bray with donkey laughter, not unmixed with muted sounds of compassion.

MERT AND PHIL. Flawed in craft but spunky in spirit, Anne Burr's unflinching drama dared playgoers to face the corruption of the flesh and the death of love.

SCAPINO. The incredibly nimble Jim Dale joins that select pantheon of comic agility, men like Bobby Clark, Bert Lahr, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, who clowned in flawless body English.

THE NATIONAL HEALTH. Death takes no holidays in the terminal wards of this British state hospital; yet gallows humor staunchly stifles despair in Peter Nichols' remarkably percipient drama of human resilience.

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