Patti LuPone’s basement looks like a cross between a penny arcade, a TGI Fridays, and an after-hours piano bar. You’ve probably seen it, too, if you’ve followed her on social media in recent weeks. From her home in Kent, Connecticut, where she’s riding out the storm with her husband and her twenty-nine-year-old son, LuPone has been staving off boredom, and entertaining her fans, with virtual tours of her impressive tchotchke collection. “Here’s Nipper, the RCA dog!” she says in one video, as she pats an oversized porcelain Jack Russell terrier on the head. Wearing sweats and shearling slippers, she dances around to a Les Paul record from an antique jukebox while she continues naming random objects. “Massage table!” “Pinball machine!” “Piano that I bought when I did ‘Evita’! Eleven thousand dollars! It’s broken now!” By the end of the two-minute clip, she is snapping her hands in the air like an enthusiastic Tevye. It is not clear whether her theatrics mean she’s descended into quarantine-induced madness, or whether her flamboyant goofiness is the only sane response to being stuck indoors. Either way, the show must go on.

LuPone, who is seventy years old, knows a thing or two about persistence in show business. She has been acting since the early nineteen-seventies, when she made her Broadway début as Irina in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” She won her first Tony Award in 1980, for playing Eva Perón in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita.” (According to her 2010 memoir, LuPone invented the iconic hand formation at the end of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” during a photo shoot: “I raised my arms in a V. I did it spontaneously.”) She won another Tony in 2008 for her role as Mama Rose in a revival of “Gypsy,” and earned another five nominations. She also won two Grammys, two Olivier Awards, and, in 2006, joined the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Throughout the decades, LuPone has earned a reputation as a woman unafraid to speak her mind, or, as she puts it, as a “roaring bitch.” Her memoir is a delicious soup of score-settling and profanity; of an aggressive actor she worked with in “The Baker’s Wife,” she writes, “I know there are two sides to every story, but believe me, both sides thought he was an asshole.”

LuPone has not mellowed with age—if anything, her vim and vitriol are zestier than ever. I spoke to her recently via Skype, as she sat in her sunny kitchen. Before the pandemic hit, LuPone was starring as Joanne in Marianne Elliott’s gender-swapping new production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” The show, which transferred to Broadway after receiving rave reviews on London’s West End, played for just two weeks of previews in New York before the coronavirus shutdown began. Still, LuPone has other projects cooking; she will appear in Ryan Murphy’s new nostalgia-bait Netflix series “Hollywood” (premiéring May 1st) as the wealthy wife of a Golden Age studio executive who hires gigolos for companionship. She is still planning concert appearances for 2021. And, in the meantime, she will be headlining her basement.

“Company” was supposed to open in March. That obviously didn’t happen. Do you know if the show will continue after this is over?

I wish I did know, because the uncertainty is upsetting. Nobody knows. And I was actually talking to my manager last night, and she said, “Even if Broadway comes back, will people even want to be sitting next to each other?”

Maybe they’ll do social-distancing Broadway, every third seat or something.

Oh, I’m sure the producers would love that, the amount of money.

It’s haunting to think about all those Broadway theatres sitting empty.

Before it happened, there were rumors going around for about a day that Broadway was shutting down. And that was shocking. I mean, I went through 9/11; I was rehearsing “Noises Off.” I think then they shut down for only two days? I don’t remember Broadway ever being shut.

At first, the producers told us that we’ll be shut down for a couple of weeks. That was their hope. But, you know, there’s a rumor mill on Broadway. We heard that people were sick in “Moulin Rouge.” And at the Booth, there was an usher that had tested positive for COVID. It was, like, oh, my God, it’s on the street! I think March 11th was the last day we were in the theatre. We were going to open on the 22nd, Steve Sondheim’s birthday. The best-laid plans.

It’s very hard. I keep wondering: Is this aliens sending a message? Is this Mother Earth sending a message? Is there so much negative energy on Earth right now that we created this virus? You do your best to stay positive.

Did you think Broadway was in a healthy place before it went on hiatus?

No, actually. I remember when I was doing “Gypsy” and [the journalist] Richard Schlesinger came to my dressing room. That was 2009, and we had the crash, and [Richard] said to me, “Do you think this is gonna affect Broadway?” And I said, “You can’t kill Broadway.” When it’s bad times we’re needed, and when it’s good times were needed.

But what I’m seeing on Broadway now is really just a bunch of trash. It’s become Las Vegas. I have not seen “Girl from the North Country,” which I wanted to see, and I wanted to see “Hangmen.” Those really good productions sneak in there. But I think that there should be term limits on federal and Supreme judges, on anybody that’s in the government, in Congress and the Senate, and on Broadway musicals. Five years, and get out of the theatre. Theatre isn’t vital if it isn’t exchanging ideas.

You’re about to star in Ryan Murphy’s TV series “Hollywood.” What drew you to the character of Avis?

Ryan wrote a woman who succeeds in a power situation and makes all the right choices without fear. She has a real emotional variety. And then, you know, of course, I look stunning.

Have I seen you do a sex scene before? I’ve never seen you bent over a stair railing before, that’s for sure.

God bless Ryan! I don’t know what else to say.

No, I’ve never—wait, I did have a sex scene! In “Summer of Sam,” with Mike Starr. He ripped off my bodice, and I was topless. I actually got a piece of fan mail, where the fan had a picture of me in “Sweeney Todd,” a picture of me as “Evita,” and the picture of me topless from “Summer of Sam.” I also did a film in Italy years ago and had a sex scene. You know, it’s too bad more people don’t think of me for that, because I’m game for anything.

The theatre, at least, is a medium that does seem to value aging women.

Totally. I think theatre is feminine, and film is masculine. You have that aesthetic distance. You suspend your disbelief when you’re seeing Vanessa Redgrave on stage playing Mary Tyrone, even though she may be twenty years too old for it. There was that permission given. It could just be the magic of being in the dark. I don’t know, but it is different on stage. HD is unforgiving. [In Hollywood,] I kept saying, “Where’s the cheesecloth? Give me more bounce lights!”