The Best Plays

These are the plays which in the light of metropolitan criticism seem most important: ROMEO AND JULIET--Street brawls, a moonlit balcony, young love, clandestine marriage--Jane Cowl and Rollo Peters prove that these are the prerogatives of youth.

MERTON OF THE MOVIES--From the duckpond of Simsbury, Ill., Merton Gill (Glenn Hunter), unsophisticated duckling, takes flight to Hollywood, imagining he is a swan. The dream collapses, but the duckling succeeds in an hilarious parody of other waddlers.

RAIN--A powerful and well-acted indictment of a rabid missionary in the South Seas. For three acts the audience squirms with delight while Jeanne Eagels discredits " the eleventh commandment": Thou shall not commit enjoyment.

YOU AND I--H. B. Warner plays a kindly part in a comedy of disillusionment. He turns from soap manufacture to painting, puts his soul on canvas, and sells it--as the skin you love to touch.

PEER GYNT-- Ibsen's lyric of rebellion and ambition. Joseph Schildkraut plays the magnificent, ineffectual rebel. He drinks the joys of insurrection and finally tastes its dregs because he is not great enough to be a Prometheus or a Satan.

THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE--Bernard Shaw's version of rebellion--half psychology, half melodrama. Sophisticated snorers had best instruct the usher to wake them before the last act in which Roland Young's performance is more than worth any half hour's sleep.

SEVENTH HEAVEN--Illustrating the joys of a literal ascent from the sewer to the gutter. Its seventh heaven is only the top floor of a tenement from which Helen Menken succeeds in driving out the angel of darkness.

ZANDER THE GREAT--Alice Brady plays an engaging foster mother, taking the orphaned Alexander to find his father in Arizona. They encounter instead a "brutal" bootlegger in chaps--whom the little child leads into a vale of righteous happiness.

POLLY PREFERRED--A pretty face (on Genevieve Tobin) and Paris gowns (on the rest of Miss Tobin) carry a virtuous and unsuccessful chorine from the Automat to Fashion Row--from Fashion Row to Fame (Hollywood variety).

ICEBOUND--Grim New England and grasping relatives make a powerful play, relieved only by one admirable character and a reforming reprobate.