Best Plays in Manhattan

SERIOUS

PORGY--Negro players still militant in a relentless tragedy of the Charleston riverfront (TIME, Oct. 24).

COQUETTE--Helen Hayes, recently become Mrs. Charles MacArthur, still stressing the story of a luckless betrothal (TIME, Nov. 21).

STRANGE INTERLUDE--The Theatre Guild's tireless mammoth cavorting seriously for September standees (TIME, Feb. 13).

FUNNY

THE ROYAL FAMILY--Continuous disturbances in a family of theatrical grandees (TIME, Jan. 9).

THE BACHELOR FATHER--A libertine reaps his wild oats as gaily as he sowed them (TIME, March 12).

VOLPONE--Ben Jonson's satiric story of a Venetian miser sumptuously staged by the Theatre Guild (TIME, April 23).

BOTH OR NEITHER

THE TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN--A long, long trial, unravelling the story of a chorus girl who didn't shoot the man who kept her (TIME, Oct. 3).

THE SILENT HOUSE--No longer, as described in advertisements, "a new mystery play" but still, what with yellow fiends and poison gas, a good one (TIME, Feb. 20).

THE FRONT PAGE--Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's scoop on the news-gathering racket (TIME, June 4, Aug. 27).

MUSICAL

Light lines, legs and lyrics: Good News, A Connecticut Yankee, Show Boat, Rain or Shine, Blackbirds of 1928, George White's Scandals, Earl Carroll's Vanities.