Sentence:  In each case, an individual author confronts an individual responder, an ‘<WSD>audient</WSD>', with a single artistic construct. (Even in co-written books, there is a unified authorship, and even in communal play-going, the experience involves a discrete work presented in a discrete form to a discrete ‘<WSD>audient</WSD>'.) 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A hearer.