Yes, NPC’s are a must, as most of us have said. My interpretation of what the OP has said, though, is that his immediate family legitimately qualifies for enough aid to afford full-need-met schools like NYU and CMU (or at least I certainly hope so given the ED application 
), but that extended family may pitch in as needed.
However… the premise that you’d preemptively foreclose on otherwise-excellent options like UMass-Amherst and BU, just because more people from your high school go there than you’d prefer, is a little hard for me to wrap my head around. Even if 50 kids from your school went to each of these universities each year, that would still comprise less than 1% of the undergrad population, and there would quite likely be nobody from your school in your particularly BFA program.
Absolutely, once you have decisions and financial aid packages in hand and need “tiebreaker” criteria, your preference to go farther away to a school where you wouldn’t know people from HS is a fair thing to consider. But not applying at all, and potentially putting family members in a position of having to scrape up a lot more money to fund your education because you ruled out otherwise top-notch options close to home, seems unwise to me. You already have limitations on what will work, financially and geographically/culturally/politically. I don’t think imposing additional, arguably-frivolous limitations up-front makes sense.
Yes, SUNY Purchase would be a great one to add - it’s a flagship-match campus, and Massachusets is included in that. It was also trans-friendly even back when that was very rare. Agreed that shooting your shot at Yale could be worth trying too, if an ED acceptance to NYU doesn’t come through.
I don’t have time to research this at the moment, but how about Marymount Manhattan which is being taken over by Northeastern - is their Theatre Tech major going to continue?