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Back to School (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Newsman Dave Brinkley organizes a survey of school problems across the country.
THEATER
A Raisin in the Sun. There is no sun in this Chicago Negro tenement, but the characters who live there light up Lorraine Hansberry's first play with love, humor and dreams of escape.
J.B. Tailored by Archibald MacLeish, Job in grey flannels cuts an impressive theatrical figure, even if he does lack the fierce language and logic of his Biblical ancestor.
From the cockney and king's English of My Fair Lady, past the pure Iowa corn of The Music Man to the pidgin of Flower Drum Song, the best of the musicals make a cosmopolitan chorus. Redhead sings along only because Gwen Verdon calls the tune.
Off Broadway
Mark Twain Tonight! The white-mustached, white-suited, cantankerous old humorist burns as pungently as his own stogie when Hal Holbrook brings him to life in a brilliant solo.
Straw Hat
Stratford, Ont., Avon Theater: A Scottish fantasy, The Heart Is Highland.
Brunswick, Me., Summer Playhouse: Frank Loesser's The Most Happy Fella.
Atlantic Beach, L.I., Capri Theater: Comedian Joey Adams in The Gazebo.
Latham, N.Y., Colonie Musical Theater: Professionally dumb Dody Goodman in Bells Are Ringing.
Fishkill, N.Y., Cecil wood Theater: In the Counting House (new play).
Olney, Md., Theater: The Power and the Glory, adapted from Graham Greene's novel.
Miami, Fla., Coconut Grove Playhouse: Pal Joey.
Wilmington, Ohio, Summer Theater: Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.
Indianapolis, Ind., Avondale Playhouse: Joe E. Brown as Father of the Bride.
Fort Worth, Texas, Casa Manana: Annie Get Your Gun.
Ashland, Ore., Festival Theater: Twelfth Night, King John, Measure for Measure, and Antony and Cleopatra.
Seattle, Wash., Cirque Playhouse: Edward Everett Horton in Not in the Book (new play).
BOOKS
Best Reading
The Same Door, by John Updike. Edged, understated stories in the best New Yorker tradition by one of the best of the magazine's young writers.
Daughter of France, by V. Sackville-West. A witty portrait of the lumbering spinster who was Louis XIV's cousin, against a backdrop of her brilliant and squalid age.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima. A psychotic Buddhist priest, despising his ugly self and loathing beauty, burns down a magnificent 14th century temple—and a master of literary indirection tells why.
For 2¢ Plain, by Harry Golden. More potshots in the Carolina Israelite's blintz-krieg of sentiment about old New York, satire about the new South.
The Satyricon of Petronius, translated by William Arrowsmith. Antic haymaking in Nero's gaudy, bawdy Rome, described by a satirist who knew his satyrs.
The Tents of Wickedness, by Peter De Vries. More overall nonsense in the Connecticut chowder, this time with parodies as well as puns to enliven suburbia's upper-middle jinks.
Image of America, by R. L. Bruckberger. A thoughtful French priest writes what is outrageous heresy to most of his nation's intellectuals—a warm, clear-eyed appreciation of the U.S. as the 20th century's true revolutionary force.