writing for a specific audience vs. writing into the unknown

This is a rich subject for playwrights because it gets at a fundamental tension in art.

When you write for a specific audience, you gain clarity. You know who is sitting in the seats. You know their assumptions, references, prejudices, and desires. The work can become sharper, funnier, more immediate. A playwright writing for the subscribers of a regional theatre in Minneapolis will make different choices than one writing for downtown audiences in New York. A church audience, a college audience, and a fringe festival audience each invite different kinds of storytelling.

A useful way to think about it is through playwrights who wrote primarily for a known audience:

Noel Coward

Coward wrote for the sophisticated London and West End audiences of his day. His wit, social observations, and glamorous settings were aimed at people who recognized themselves — or wished they did — onstage.

Audience in mind: Upper-middle-class and affluent theatergoers.

Result: Enormous contemporary success, though some plays feel tied to their era.

Neil Simon

Simon knew exactly who was buying tickets on Broadway in the 1960s and 1970s: middle-class Americans looking for recognizable lives and plenty of laughs.

Audience in mind: Mainstream commercial theater audiences.

Result: Huge popularity and financial success.

August Wilson

Wilson wrote specifically from and for the Black American experience. He wasn't trying to make his work universally accessible first; he trusted that specificity would create universality.

Audience in mind: Black communities and the stories often absent from American stages.

Result: The work reached far beyond that audience.

The danger in writing for a specific audience is that the audience can become a master instead of a companion. The writer starts anticipating reactions rather than pursuing discoveries. The work becomes calibrated rather than necessary. It may succeed with its target audience while losing the qualities that allow it to travel beyond them.

Writing into the unknown is the opposite gamble. You write for an audience that does not yet exist. Perhaps you write for one ideal reader, or for yourself, or for no one in particular. You follow the material wherever it leads. This approach often produces work that feels more original because it is not shaped by current expectations.

The danger here is isolation. Without any audience in mind, a writer can mistake obscurity for depth or self-expression for communication. Art is, after all, a conversation. If nobody can enter the room, the conversation ends before it begins.

A useful way to think about it is through playwrights who wrote primarily for the unknown:

Samuel Beckett

Imagine pitching Waiting for Godot to a producer: two men wait for someone who never arrives. Beckett wasn't trying to satisfy audience demand. He followed an artistic vision.

Audience in mind: No obvious audience.

Result: One of the most influential plays of the twentieth century.

Lorraine Hansberry

When she wrote A Raisin in the Sun, there was no established Broadway audience clamoring for such a story. She wrote the play she believed needed to exist.

Audience in mind: The truth of the story itself.

Result: A landmark American play.

Tony Kushner

Angels in America is sprawling, political, spiritual, and unconventional. It wasn't engineered to meet commercial expectations.

Audience in mind: Unclear.

Result: It created its own audience.

Many of the most enduring works occupy a middle ground. They are deeply personal but highly communicative. The creator is not asking, "What does the audience want?" Nor are they asking, "What do I want to say?" Instead, they ask, "What is true, and how can I make others experience it?"

For playwrights especially, this tension is unavoidable. Theatre is the most audience-dependent art form. A novel can wait decades for its readers. A play comes alive only when strangers gather in a room. Yet the playwright who chases audience approval often creates disposable work, while the playwright who ignores the audience entirely creates work that may never connect.

The paradox is that the best way to reach an audience is often to stop trying to please one. Write with enough specificity and conviction that the audience feels they have discovered something real. If the work is honest enough, the unknown audience eventually finds itself inside the story.

As Tennessee Williams once observed, the playwright's task is not to give people what they expect but to reveal what they recognize only after they see it. The audience arrives unknown. Recognition is what turns them into your audience.