The Theatre: Best Plays: Jan. 11, 1926

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

SERIOUS

OUTSIDE LOOKING IN—A story of tramps, many men and one woman, and how the men fought for her and arranged her escape from justice.

WHITE CARGO—Highly thermal happenings in Africa when a white man wilts, morally, in the lonely heat and goes native.

CRAIG’S WIFE—An intricate and amazingly well played study of a woman in whom love had changed into a deep passion for the ornaments and machinery of her cheerless household.

A MAN’S MAN—A story of desire under the Elevated, in which the husband wants to be an Elk and the wife a movie actress—both failing ignominiously.

THE GREEN HAT—Michael Arlen’s ingenious artificialities recaptured in a play chiefly important for the performance of Katharine Cornell.

THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED—Pauline Lord still showing how a waitress may marry an old farmer from loneliness and run into a lot of trouble.

LESS SERIOUS

THE BUTTER AND EGG MAN—A satirical tale of the Theatre, heavily buttered with brilliant lines and deftly egged on by the skill of Gregory Kelly.

ARMS AND THE MAN—Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne opening the Theatre Guild’s Shaw season with the early anti-war “comedy.

THE VORTEX—London society at decadent, amusing and finally fearfully moving moments. Noel Coward, actor and author.

CRADLE SNATCHERS—A shifty slice of frank indelicacy concerning three middle-aged women and three boys, which the masses are crazy to enjoy.

IS ZAT So?—Blunt and caustic argot of the prize ring injected into the seemly quietude of a Fifth Avenue home.

THE POOR NUT—College capers of unauthentic but generously amusing cut.

MUSICAL Song and dance and damsels are most divertingly combined in the following: Sunny, Louie the 14th, Big Boy, Artists and Models, The Vagabond King, The Student Prince, Rose-Marie, Tip-Toes, The Vanities, No, No, Nanette.