Patti will get you to stop texting!
Hold the phone!
Actually, just turn it off or Patti LuPone just may take it if she spies you texting like she did during a recent performance of her play, Shows for Days.
After cell phones reportedly went off four different times during a Wednesday matinee performance and, at one point, a woman was openly texting during the show, the six-time Tony winner took matters into her own hands. Without breaking character, The New York Times reports LuPone walked up to the audience member and took her device.
"We could see her text. She was so uninterested. She showed her husband what she was texting," LuPone explained to the newspaper. "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?' At the very end of that scene, we all exit. What I normally do is shake the hand of the people in the front row. I just walked over to her, shook her hand and took her phone. I walked offstage and handed it to the stage manager, who gave it to the house manager."
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This isn't the only instance of a rude audience member using their phone in the theater. In fact, one patron actually jumped on stage at Broadway's Hand to God before the show started to try to charge his phone on a stage outlet.
As seen in the video, security guards quickly removed him from the stage. Playbill.com confirmed that the socket was not even a working outlet as it was just part of the set.
Of course, the entire incident was caught on other audience members, who took to Twitter to lament about the incident.
Someone hopped onstage at Hand to God on Broadway to charge their phone on the set before the show.
Logic, people. Logic.
— ✨ eric gelb ✨ (@DirectorGelb) July 6, 2015NEWS: 13 Thoughts That Everyone Has In a Group Text
But the disturbance isn't limited to the general public. Madonna reportedly texted throughout a recent performance of Hamilton. "That b***h was on her phone," Jonathan Groff, the show's star, told dot429. "You couldn't miss it from the stage. It was a black void of the audience in front of us and her face there perfectly lit by the light of her iPhone through three-quarters of the show."
In the same interview with The New York Times, Lupone suggests that we should all be smarter than our phones.
"I don't know why they buy the ticket or come to the theater if they can't let go of the phone. It's controlling them," she said. "They can't turn it off and can't stop looking at it. They are truly inconsiderate, self-absorbed people who have no public manners whatsoever. I don't know what to do anymore. I was hired as an actor, not a policeman of the audience."
Moral of the story?
Those texts can wait!
Check out the video below to remember a time when we weren’t so tech-savvy and see how Carmen Electra discovered the internet.
