United States

Also much influenced by European models, though in his case by the absurdist theatre of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, was Edward Albee, the most prominent American playwright of the 1960s. As Broadway’s dominance of the American stage waned in the 1970s, regional theatre took on new importance, and cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Louisville, Kentucky, provided significant proving grounds for a new generation of playwrights. On those smaller but still potent stages, theatre continues to speak powerfully. An African American renaissance in the theatre has taken place, with its most notable figure being August Wilson, whose 1985 play Fences won the Pulitzer Prize. And, for the renewal and preservation of the American language, there is still nothing to equal the stage: David Mamet, in his plays, among them Glengarry, Glen Ross (1983) and Speed the Plow (1987), both caught and created an American vernacular—verbose, repetitive, obscene, and eloquent—that combined the local colour of Damon Runyon and the bleak truthfulness of Harold Pinter. The one completely original American contribution to the stage, the musical theatre, blossomed in the 1940s and ’50s in the works of Frank Loesser (especially Guys and Dolls, which the critic Kenneth Tynan regarded as one of the greatest of American plays) but became heavy-handed and at the beginning of the 21st century existed largely as a revival art and in the brave “holdout” work of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods). As the new century progressed, however, innovation once again found its way to Broadway with productions such as Steve Sater and Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Wicked, Jeff Whitty, Jeff Marx, and Robert Lopez’s Avenue Q, Lopez, Matt Stone, and Trey Parker’s The Book of Mormon, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.

Playwright August WilsonTed S. Warren/AP Images

Motion pictures

In some respects the motion picture is the American art form par excellence, and no area of art has undergone a more dramatic revision in critical appraisal in the recent past. Throughout most of the 1940s and ’50s, serious critics, with a few honourable exceptions (notably, James Agee and Manny Farber), even those who took the cinema seriously as a potential artistic medium, took it for granted that (excepting the work of D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles), the commercial Hollywood movie was, judged as art, hopelessly compromised by commerce. In the 1950s in France, however, a generation of critics associated with the magazine Cahiers du cinéma (many of whom later would become well-known filmmakers themselves, including François Truffaut and Claude Lelouch) argued that the American commercial film, precisely because its need to please a mass audience had helped it break out of the limiting gentility of the European cinema, had a vitality and, even more surprisingly, a set of master-makers (auteurs) without equal in the world. New studies and appreciations of such Hollywood filmmakers as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and William Wyler resulted, and, eventually, this new evaluation worked its way back into the United States itself: another demonstration that one country’s low art can become another country’s high art. Imported back into the United States, this reevaluation changed and amended preconceptions that had hardened into prejudices.

(From left) Lauren Bacall, Marcel Dalio, and Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944), directed by Howard Hawks.© 1945 Warner Brothers, Inc.; photograph from a private collection

Robert Duvall (centre) in Apocalypse Now (1979).© 1979 Omni Zoetrope; photograph from a private collection