The Best Plays

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

ROMEO AND JULIET--Old Verona revived by Jane Cowl and Rollo Peters to the complete satisfaction of critical New York. Youth, invaluable asset, figures more prominently than ever before in metropolitan Shakespeare.

MERTON OF THE MOVIES--Glenn Hunter as a movie-struck youth pursues a drawing-room hero ideal and finds his mission in the movies strictly comic.

RAIN--Hard language and a realistic rainstorm combine as atmosphere in an attack on the forcibly fed Christianity of foreign missions. Jeanne Eagels presents the most successfully uneasy virtue of the season.

SEVENTH HEAVEN--A Iong snake whip and a rendering of La Marseillaise off-stage are the emotional assistants to Helen Menken in a skillfully concocted assembly of Parisian eccentrics.

KIKI--Lenore Ulric entering the last lap of her inordinately long career as the Parisienne who wasn't a bad girl after all. She wears an attractive checked skirt in the first act.

THE ADDING MACHINE--The utmost in expressionism. Mr. Zero kills his employer, is executed and looks over the hereafter. He finds heaven lacking in respectability. A fantastic study of a stunted soul.

YOU AND I--The best cast in town intensifying the brilliant bits in Philip Barry's comedy of marriage, art and the younger generation. Quite the smartest thing of the winter.

PEER GYNT--"Down the vast edges drear" of a hard-hearted world Ibsen leads his hero on the futile quest for happiness. Peer, the boaster, is picturesquely played by Joseph Schildkraut and the Simonson settings are eerily effective.

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.

POLLY PREFERRED--Genevieve Tobin appears in a comedy with a perfect first act. A go-getter, finding a pretty girl stranded in the Automat, makes a movie star and eventually a wife out of her. A burlesque director furnishes many a laugh.