Yes, is the answer: In 2012, the Freakonomics podcast did an episode about just the kind of anxiety I experienced. It compared Sleep No More to social scientist Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, in which “regular” people were given roles as guards and prisoners, and made anonymous (police officers, for example, masked by reflective sunglasses). Relieved of accountability and dropped in an elaborate mise en scène, they began to torture and abuse each other. If you’re a situationist like Zimbardo (as in, you believe in the power of surroundings to influence behavior), then you won’t be surprised to hear that Sleep No More had to begin banning bags of all sizes because the audience repeatedly stole items from the set and pick-pocketing had been reported as well.

Nevermind the fact that it’s dark, that everyone’s in masks and that all recording devices are strictly forbidden, The Drowned Man is the site of the perfect murder because it will be impossible to investigate. Audience members of The Drowned Man are told at the start of the play that they may be selected individually to interact with performers. They are expecting the line between real and fake to be blurred, so when a detective asks them if they saw anything strange, they might begin to make things up: “Yeah, yeah, I saw Billy down by Studio 2 with blood all over his hands. He was real mad.” The less eager witness might answer honestly: “Yeah, I saw like two murders.” This is the truth because the “plot” of The Drowned Man, which the audience understands mostly from a text handed out before the show, involves lovers’ spats that end in two killings. But because people are instructed at the beginning of the show not to speak a word, and I am a born rule-follower, if a detective asked me if I’d seen anything unusual, I would probably just silently reach out and run my hand over his face.

“Punchdrunk” is an American term that has nothing to do with drink, but with taking punches, like a prizefighter described in a 1912 Wisconsin newspaper: “Punchdrunk through the first round and floundering around like a great helpless calf, his mouth and nose shedding blood in a thick stream.” The idea that a diabolical, long-planning spouse-shanker will see the pre-fab murder scene of The Drowned Man as a bargain at just $60 a ticket might be a bit cartoonish, but I do fear the audience because I felt a frustration, too. Challenged by the darkness, licenced by masks, I felt the powerlessness and passivity that might confuse any of us great, helpless calves enough to throw a punch.