Best of '87

HUNTING COCKROACHES A vibrant farce by Polish Emigre Janusz Glowacki evoking the plight of refugee intellectuals: an actress who cannot overcome her glottal-stop accent and her novelist husband who looks for his lost sense of context and insight by puzzling over the rectilinear shapes of Western states on his map.

INTO THE WOODS Stephen Sondheim's best musical yet, gorgeous to look at and haunting to hear. A fractured fairy tale bringing into the same forest Cinderella, Rapunzel and the like and asking what comes after happily-ever- after.

JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE At the Yale Rep and on tour, a shimmering, mysterious depiction of rootless and religiously obsessed blacks in the early 20th century. The best work of August Wilson, the stage's foremost poet of the American black experience, who this year won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony for Fences when it reached Broadway.

LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES Choderlos de Laclos's classic epistolary novel of sexual conquest and betrayal, given entrancing wit and apocalyptic power by Adapter Christopher Hampton and a dazzling Royal Shakespeare Company production.

THE MAHABHARATA A 9 1/2-hour adaptation by Peter Brook, elder statesman of the avant-garde, of the great Hindu antiwar epic. Inevitable longueurs and some uncertain English from a polyglot cast, but spellbinding ritual and visual metaphor.

LES MISERABLES Victor Hugo's unforgettable story set to an emotion-drenched score. Throbbing with outrage yet, in the nonpareil staging by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, exalting.

THE ROAD TO MECCA Athol Fugard's almost Ibsenesque musing about the conflict between an independent artist and orderly society.

SWEET SUE A.R. Gurney Jr.'s wry May-September romance, with each of its two characters represented by two actors, not as a gimmick but as a reflection of the underlying theme: that the real action in anyone's life takes place inside his or her own head.

THREE POSTCARDS A delicately surreal play with music bringing together three women for a dinner that yields expected revelations in unexpected ways. From South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa, Calif., an unlikely but thriving venue for new work.

A WALK IN THE WOODS From Yale, Lee Blessing's witty and provocative two- hander, debating, of all things, nuclear disarmament, via the Geneva chats of a Soviet and a U.S. negotiator.