In Why We Need Broadway, the American scholar and critic Stanley Kaufmann depicts the theatre auditorium as the last remaining public meeting place for the lonely souls who together constitute Western society, a place where the concept of a public still exists, a place which attracts individuals who have paid out of their own pockets for a ticket which entitles them to share a personal experience with the strangers seated beside them in the dark, and with whom, for one evening, they become a community – or at least the closest thing to a community possible in the Western city of today.