Watch: Patti LuPone Taking a 'Break' from a 'Dumbed Down' Broadway

Broadway icon Patti LuPone gave up her Actors Equity card, but not with an eye to retirement. The storied stage veteran says she needs a "break" from the Great White Way's "dumbed down" culture, Variety reported.

While attending an Oct. 18 premiere event for the Netflix fantasy movie "The School for Good and Evil," in which she has a role, LuPone told Variety, "I just gave up my equity card, but that doesn't mean that I can't perform on-stage." Indeed, Variety relayed, LuPone said that "provisions in her former membership allow her to still make guest appearances on stage in the meantime, but without being a part of the labor union, she won't be taking any major roles on Broadway any time soon."

But that's OK with the star. "It's 50 years that I've been a member of Actors Equity, and I think I need a break from the stage," LuPone told Variety's Marc Malkin.

She had other reasons, too, for letting her membership lapse, which LuPone unleashed in the interview.

"Broadway has also changed considerably," the stage icon said. "I think we've spent – not we, but whoever's in charge of, whatever – has actively dumbed down the audience. And so the attention span of the majority of the audience, I think, is much less than it was in the past, and I don't think plays are going to have long lives on Broadway – I feel as though it's turning into Disneyland, a circus and Las Vegas."

That said, LuPone allowed that "There's still very intelligent audiences that support the theater, but the ticket price is outrageous." She continued: "There's so many obstacles that prevent theater from being the tool it should be in society, which is an education."

As befits a Broadway diva, LuPone first announced stepping away from Actors Equity in a dramatic tweet.

"Quite a week on Broadway, seeing my name being bandied about," LuPone posted to Twitter on Oct. 17.

This was evidently in reference to being "dragged into recent Broadway controversy," Variety recounted.

"When 'Hadestown' star Lillias White called out an audience member from the stage last Wednesday for using a recording device, only to find out it was a captioning device for those with impaired hearing, comparisons were quickly drawn on social media to LuPone's explicit takedown of theatergoers not putting their masks above their noses," the article explained.

Watch LuPone's comments in the video below.