Patti LuPone, the Broadway luminary known for her bluntness and never-say-sorry M.O., has taken an unusual turn: She apologized for something she said. The circumstances surrounding the actress’s apology are controversial but underscore that if you’re doing crisis communications today, you’re doing crisis communications in supersensitive times.

The story’s origins go back to last fall. LuPone, a three-time Tony Award winner, was starring in a two-woman play called The Roommate. The theater next door offered the Alicia Keys jukebox musical, Hell’s Kitchen. LuPone (pictured) complained that the sound from the musical was bleeding into the theater where she was performing (a not-unheard-of — get it? — problem on Broadway). She approached the Shubert Organization, which ran both theaters. The musical made sound adjustments.

Those changes were apparently to LuPone’s satisfaction, as she sent thank-you flowers to the sound crew. Another part of the episode: LuPone was videotaped refusing to sign a fan’s Playbill from Hell’s Kitchen. “I’m not signing a Hell’s Kitchen,” she said. “They’re too loud.”

On November 2, Kecia Lewis, who plays a piano teacher in Hell’s Kitchen (for which she won a Tony), posted a video in which she decried LuPone’s actions as “racially microaggressive” and “rooted in privilege.” Lewis’s example of a microaggression was “calling a Black show loud in a way that dismisses it.” Sending the flowers was “dismissive and out of touch,” Lewis said. Broadway superstar Audra McDonald (six Tonys) supported the video with emojis.

LuPone Profile

The next shoe dropped recently. On May 26, The New Yorker magazine published a profile of the 76-year-old LuPone in which she was asked about the Hell’s Kitchen episode. In response, she referred to Lewis as a “b—-” (rhymes with “witch”) and said McDonald “should know better.”

LuPone’s New Yorker comments caused an outcry. On May 30, an open letter signed by hundreds of theater professionals was posted. The letter lambasted LuPone’s “deeply inappropriate and unacceptable public comments about” Lewis and McDonald. It called on the American Theatre Wing and the Broadway League to impose accountability measures against those who cross such lines, including banning them from the Tony Awards.

The next day, LuPone posted her statement and apology on Facebook and Instagram. It began, interestingly for our purposes, “For as long as I have worked in the theatre, I have spoken my mind and never apologized. That is changing today.” She apologized for her words in the New Yorker interview, particularly those about Lewis, which she called “demeaning and disrespectful.” “I am devastated that my behavior has offended others and has run counter to what we hold dear in this community,” she wrote.

‘Full Responsibility’

LuPone “wholeheartedly” agreed with the open letter released the day before, she said. “I made a mistake, I take full responsibility for it and I am committed to making this right.”

So why the switcheroo? LuPone may have genuinely felt she crossed a line with her language, and an apology was called for, though in the New Yorker she used the b-word about actress Glenn Close, and she doesn’t mention Close in her mea culpa. Or maybe she thought she needed to do (or was advised to do) damage control (especially because the Tonys are this Sunday?).

Yet we also can’t ignore that she apologized at a time when people are more sensitive to even minor affronts or microaggressions, not that we’re defending affronts and microaggressions. The point is that communicators would be well advised to take those sensitivities into account when deciding whether and how to respond to (and perhaps apologize for) a crisis.

Photo Credit: lev radin/Shutterstock

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