The Best PLays

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

THE LAUGHING LADY--Ethel Barrymore is back in the drawing room. As the somewhat declasse Lady Marjorie, she is epigrammatically but insistently prudish about her love affair with the brilliant, married lawyer who flayed her in the divorce court.

PEER GYNT--Ibsen's poetic phantasmagoria of self-sufficient compromise, with expressionist settings. Joseph Schildkraut is the braggart Peer, whose age and locality change with equal celerity.

ROMEO AND JULIET--Jane Cowl and Rollo Peters offer a vitalized Romeo and Juliet. The interpretation is not notable for subtlety or profundity. Careless enthusiasm is its chief charm.

MOSCOW ART THEATRE--It is a very trifling barrier that the Moscow players use their native tongue. The reality and expressiveness of the performance make broader meanings as clear as daylight and inconceivably moving. This is the most justly famous group of actors in the world. Plays by Tchekov, Gorki, Tolstoi are presented.

THE GOD OF VENGEANCE -- The daughter of a Polish Jew, keeper of a brothel, falls a victim to her environment in a repulsively explicit scene with a Lesbian. Rudolph Schildkraut makes the father's misery immensely moving.

MERTON OF THE MOVIES--A skilful dramatization of Harry Leon Wilson's story of the movie-struck youth who quite unintentionally becomes a great comedian, with a corresponding loss of illusions.

RAIN--A devastating attack on the missionary who uses the Bible as a club to drive lost sheep into the fold. The play is distinguished by Jeanne Eagels' acting and by real rain falling dismally throughout.

SEVENTH HEAVEN--Helen Menken begins as the timorous sister of an absinthe-soaked shrew, but at the end of the second act, her courage restored by love, she turns on the sister and lashes her with a black whip.

LOYALTIES--The adventures of a rich and disagreeable Jew, persecuted by amiable clubmen, prove that conflicts in loyalties may bring disaster. The play is always interesting, if somewhat theatric.

KIKI.--Lenore Ulric as the little Parisienne who is not quite naughty and altogether captivating. A year on Broadway has not exhausted her supply of enthusiastic audiences.