Tony-winning Broadway actress Patti LuPone was infuriated to see an audience member texting during her show at Lincoln Center — so she ripped the cellphone out of the offender’s hand and walked off stage with it.
The star, who usually shakes hands with an audience member at the end of the first scene of the second act in “Shows for Days,” on Wednesday night encountered a woman more focused on the screen than the stage, said a Lincoln Center Theater spokesman.
Without a word, LuPone, 66, swiped the phone and walked off — “totally in character,” the spokesman said.
Michael Urie, her co-star in the dark comedy at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, praised her.
“It was good, and it didn’t disrupt the momentum of the play,” he told WNBC’s “New York Live” Thursday.
LuPone said that she was compelled to do something to stop the texting woman, who looked bored out of her mind.
“We could see her text. She was so uninterested,” LuPone told The New York Times.
“She showed her husband she was texting. We talked about it at intermission. When we went out for the second act, I was very close to her, and she was still texting. I watched her and thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ ”
The actress, who plays Irene, a diva running a theater troupe, told Playbill, “We work hard on stage to create a world that is being totally destroyed by a few, rude, self-absorbed and inconsiderate audience members who are controlled by their phones.
“When a phone goes off or when a LED screen can be seen in the dark, it ruins the experience for everyone else — the majority of the audience at that performance and the actors on stage.”
Fed up, she said she’s thinking of hanging up on her career.
“I am so defeated by this issue that I seriously question whether I want to work on stage anymore,” LuPone, 66, said.
“Now I’m putting battle gear on over my costume to marshall the audience as well as perform.”
After LuPone’s revenge, the texter, in an $87 seat, “was pissed for rest of the play. It was great,” tweeted one witness, Stephanie Tipon Catu.
The house manager gave back the phone after the show, the theater spokesman said.
LuPone’s anger had apparently been building since that day’s matinee, when ringtones and a haywire hearing aid disrupted the show, according to message boards at BroadwayWorld.com.
Fans applauded her actions. “It was DELICIOUS to watch her snatch the phone out of that woman’s hands,” one poster said.
LuPone has called out bad behavior before — once interrupting her own song during 2009’s “Gypsy” to boot photographers.