Best Plays

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

Drama

WHAT PRICE GLORY?--A battle song with some blood, no heroes and a blast of bitter irony. Deservedly the most popular play of the season.

CONSCIENCE--A mongrel mixture of good and bad playwriting made persuasive by Lillian Foster's performance of the girl who went wrong when her husband went to jail.

SILENCE--A back-switch melodrama of murder with very little literature but no end of excitement.

DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS--Eugene O'Neill's drab dissertation on home life in the backwoods of New England. A young wife, old husband, young lover and a murdered child.

S.S. GLENCAIRN--A group title for O'Neill's sea plays, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Moon of the Caribbees and The Long Voyage Home.

WHITE CARGO--One of the oldest settlers still telling its fervid tale of white men and brown women in the wastes of Africa.

Comedy

GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE--Ina Claire dipping in and out of the divorce court with several husbands, to one of whom she boomerangs.

THE GUARDSMAN--Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine prove that a man can't fool his wife no matter how good an actor he may be.

MINICK--A lower-middle-class house with the fourth wall removed to show what a hopeless mess results when an old man comes to live with his married son.

THE SHOW-OFF--The longest-winded hero you ever heard making himself so offensive that you have to like him in spite of yourself.

EXPRESSING WILLIE--A comedy deftly designed to illustrate the incompatibility of "temperament" and business life.

THE FARMER'S WIFE--Placidly amusing country comedy of middle age in which the widower finds a wife.

Musical

The maximum activity, melody and amusement can be gleaned from the following: Ziegfeld Follies, The Grab Bag, I'll Say She Is, Kid Boots, Annie Dear, Scandals, Dixie to Broadway, Ritz Rente, Rose-Marie.