CURTAIN CALL

Broadway Star Patti LuPone Won’t Be on Stage ‘for a Very Long Time’

The legendary stage actress revealed she’s given up her Equity card.

Three-time Tony Award winner Patti LuPone told The Daily Beast she won’t be on stage for “a very long time” after taking to Twitter Monday to share that she’d given up her equity card. “When the run of COMPANY ended this past July, I knew I wouldn’t be on stage for a very long time. And at that point I made the decision to resign from Equity,” she said in a statement. Hours earlier, she’d penned a cryptic week suggesting her celebrated Broadway career was over. “Quite a week on Broadway, seeing my name being bandied about. Gave up my Equity card; no longer part of that circus. Figure it out,” tweeted LuPone. Equity memberships are required to perform on stages across the U.S., including Broadway, though it wouldn’t prevent her from performing in non-union performances, and the Cabaret star could always reapply in future. The first line of LuPone’s riddle seemed to refer to recent drama around a Hadestown production, in which one of the stars called out an audience member for filming the performance when he was actually using a captioning device for his hearing disorder, drawing comparisons to LuPone, who has a reputation for calling out disruptive audiences, at one time grabbing the cellphone of an incessant texter during her Shows for Days performance at Lincoln Center in 2015.