Last weekend, as the Kavinoky Theatre concluded its successful run of Glorious with an entirely sold-out weekend, artistic director David Lamb estimated that about 2,000 Studio Arena subscribers had seen the show. These patrons were taking advantage of an offer from the theaters in the Buffalo Theatre Alliance to honor tickets to cancelled Studio Arena performances.

Studio Arena was unable to mount previously announced productions of David Hare’s The Vertical Hour and the musical revue Side by Side by Sondheim when financial woes sent them into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Members of the alliance “generously” stepped forward to honor their tickets.

With Glorious ready to open, the Kavinoky was well-positioned and the first out of the box to offer the deal, much to the consternation of other alliance members that have a similar audience profile—middle-class, suburban, older and white. The other theaters felt that a more coordinated announcement would have been more appropriate as they all sought to serve (or co-opt) the Studio Arena audience.

The fact that so many patrons opted to go to one specific theater is not good news for Studio Arena, for it is possible that many will not go home again, even if Studio does manage to work through its finances, restructure and reopen this fall. After all, the Kavinoky has similar programming, a charming proscenium theater, handy well-lit parking and a well-priced subscription. Add the fact that the Kavinoky staff stumbled over themselves to make the newly nomadic Studio Arena audience feel right at home as they came to see Mary Kate O’Connell in what everyone agreed was a drop-dead, infectiously delightful comic romp as Florence Foster Jenkins, the worst singer in the world.

This phenomenon highlights an aspect of the burgeoning theater scene in Buffalo. It’s competitive. And while there is very little overlap between audiences at the various theaters, there is great competition for one specific audience: affluent, upper-middle-class, predominantly female and white.

It is a test of great theater that it should have universal appeal. The ancient Greek tragedies still speak to us with great power, across cultures and across the thousands of years that have passed since they were written. And yet a play like Oedipus Rex could hardly be said to have mass appeal.

Typically, audiences gravitate to theatrical experiences that provide more specific and literal representations of themselves. Yes, great plays are universal, and there are sophisticated theater-goers who will see anything and anywhere, but these are relatively few.

Even those who work in the theater are notoriously loyal to their own niches. For example, the artistic directors of Buffalo’s theaters are, in general, famous for never stepping foot through each other’s doors. There are a couple who will eagerly pass judgment on each other’s work, sight unseen. I am always amused when some local artistic director makes a bold pronouncement about theater in our region, or their own theater’s merit relative to someone else’s, when I know that he never actually attends anybody else’s theater at all. (For the price of a cocktail, I’ll happily name names.)

The current dominance of the older, white, female audience is so ingrained that there are those who consider this group to be the mainstream. It is not. It isn’t even a cross-section of the Western New York population. It is a niche market, like any other.

It is an unspoken and shocking truth in the American theater. Audiences are not diverse. It can be argued that audiences are different from each other, but within any one audience, there tends to be homogeneity. When several different theaters appeal to the same audience, competition gets rough.

During a recent trip to New York City, I spent some time in the theater district watching shows let out. It was fascinating to see a predominantly African-American audience—that is to say 95 percent African-American—exiting the current revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, starring James Earl Jones, Terrence Howard, Anika Noni Rose and Phylicia Rashad; while across the street, a predominantly white audience—that is to say 98 percent white—exited from Gypsy, starring Patti LuPone.

Over on 46th Street, where In the Heights is playing at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, a happy Latin throng waited, not just for the leading players but for the actors playing every minor character as well. This crowd asked for few autographs; they just wanted to cheer and to congratulate the actors.

Like their demography, the stage door behavior of these audiences was distinct from show to show. When Terrence Howard appeared at the Broadhurst Theatre stage door, women screamed. They wanted to be photographed with the handsome star, and he happily obliged. The Patti LuPone crowd, heavy with teenagers and gay men, wanted her autograph—badly.

Each audience had come for different reasons and each had found what they were looking for.

I was curious to see who is going to see the revival of Grease that was cast through a television talent contest. I should have known—tourists. Hundreds of tourists, predominantly white; many were parents with their teenaged children. This crowd was almost as happy to be photographed with cardboard cutouts of the stars as they were with getting autographs from the real thing as they crowded round police barricades at the stage door. It was, very much, a theme park atmosphere. To these folks, the winners of a television talent contest are more famous than James Earl Jones or Patti LuPone.

David Mamet’s November, starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf, seems to have a bit of lesbian appeal—though the audience was predominantly middle-aged, white, heterosexual couples. And at Mary Poppins there were parents and grandparents with children. It was the same at The Lion King, but that show tilts to a higher percentage of boys and African-American families.

A local artistic director once complained to me that the heavily gay and relatively youthful audience that often goes to the shows at Buffalo United Artists “isn’t an audience at all, it’s a special interest group!” To this, I respond, all audiences are special interest groups. Obviously, this man saw his own homogenous audience as a kind of norm, but even the population of elderly white women who subscribe to his theater are a special interest group. His frustration is that for many of them their special interest is to be distracted as mindlessly as possible; they rebel every time he gives them a play that is intellectually challenging. This is the bargain he has made to stay financially viable.

In addition to a high percentage of women, the theater-going public has a higher percentage of Jews and homosexuals than the general public. I have often opined that Jews and homosexuals keep the theater alive. I sat at Tom Stoppard’s new trilogy at Lincoln Center last season next to a large audience of older Jewish women, highly educated and very discriminating. Their conversation at intermission was sensational, as they heatedly discussed the play, Russian literature and European history—all with great humor and insight. My disgruntled friend who eschews “special interest groups” fantasizes that his audience is like that one. It isn’t.

The truth is that we go to the theater and to the movies not to escape from our lives but to find ourselves. This is why children’s theater tends to be about children. This is why there will be a higher percentage of Jews at the performances of a Jewish theater, more gay people at gay theater and more elderly middle-class white women at what we call “mainstream” theaters. This is why the producers of Gypsy, starring Patti LuPone, have been buying full-page advertisements in national gay magazines like The Advocate.

During the early years of the regional theater movement, in the 1950s, Zelda Fichandler, a pioneer of the American theater, was frustrated that her theater, Arena Stage in Washington, DC did not seem to be able to attract an African-American audience. This concerned her, as Washington has an enormous African-American population. She tinkered with the play offerings and with casting. She found that blind-casting, or the casting of actors regardless of race, had no influence on audience response if the cast was predominantly white. The casting of an African-American star had only a slightly greater impact. There seemed to be a tipping point at which the audience she sought considered the production to be for them. This typically required a predominantly African-American cast in a story about African-American life.

Similarly, regional theaters across the nation have noted that when a production is considered to be geared to the African-American audience, there are those in the audience who will back away. For years, Studio Arena Theatre noted that some subscribers did not even show up for “that show” in the season lineup—usually the February/Black History Month offering. This can only partly be explained by racism. There is also a tendency for people to look for themselves in all entertainments. In the film world, we see this handled very deliberately and without shame. There are black pictures, women’s pictures, teen pictures, art pictures, action films for young men and so forth.

In the theater, I have noted the intensity with which these niche audiences will focus on a play that speaks to them profoundly. Audiences at JRT’s production of Kinderstransport were remarkable for their responsiveness and focus. These audiences wanted to linger and to discuss the play intently. The same was true at BUA’s production of Some Men. The audience at the all-African-American production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was crackling with intense concentration for over three hours. A presumably Catholic audience of Western New Yorkers has flocked to Victory: The Father Baker Story at MusicalFare.

A vivid example of what I am talking about arose during the recent run of the BUA/Subversive Theatre co-production of My Name is Rachel Corrie, at the Main Street Cabaret. The show did not attract the usual BUA audience. Instead, it gradually picked up a Jewish audience, and eventually it attracted a Muslim family audience. Certainly, this evolving audience had not received direct mail informing them of the production. The controversial story of Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza while obstructing the demolition of Palestinian civilian homes, called out to audiences who are invested in what is happening in the Middle East.

I am not suggesting that theaters should be organized exclusively around culture and race, only that these are powerful variables in our society and provide a vivid and visible example of the ways in which audiences choose theater experiences. In this light, the suggestion that Buffalo might have too many theaters is a profoundly white, middle-class assertion. In any light, discussing whether we have “too many” theaters reduces the discussion to its lowest level. There should be as many theaters as the public wants to sustain. It is possible that there are too many theaters competing for the white, older, female, middle-class demographic, and in the natural progression of things, those who cannot compete should go out of business. On the other hand, excellence begets excellence, and in theory the competition itself should be good for the art.