The cell phone, maddeningly silent all day, rings. You’ve agreed to participate in an interactive, site-specific theater piece, Accomplice: New York, but until the call arrives, late on a Friday afternoon, you’re clueless about where you’re going or what you’re doing or what form your interaction will take. Uncertain, you answer the call, and immediately hear a man with an awful accent—one-part dark Brooklyn, one-part dank Long Island. Following some great banter (and the feeling you could use U.N. headphones to translate his words), you manage to decipher the whys and wherefores of how to be, as the title says, an accomplice to a fictional crime. And you’d better be certain, he emphasizes, not to muck up the assignment.

I’ll take that warning at face value. The last thing I ever want is to hear that guy again. Accordingly, I will not tell you what Accomplice is all about, what the assignments are that are given to the participants, where you go to commence the assignments, what you do in order to accomplish the assignments, how long the experience lasts or anything else specific about the whole thing. I can tell you that Accomplice, which involves a certain number of activities and functions being performed in certain places in certain times, was certainly a good bit of fun for me, my significant other, a good friend of mine and a good friend of his. But I’m keeping all their names out of print—for my own protection as well as theirs.

It’s during that first phone call that the certain individual gives you your first set of instructions—to meet at a certain indiscreet public spot at a certain time, where you’ll be meeting up with a certain person who happens to look a certain way. There, that certain person will give you, among other things, a much-needed explanation of why you’re going to be an “accomplice” to this “crime:” Buying into the scheme is, above all, essential to the fun. In all, there were 10 accomplices on our team, but as my friends were running 15 minutes late—mostly because the meeting place was so indiscreet as to be one of the most crowded public areas in New York City—this certain person, playing his character with “Sopranos”-like flair, became quite heated, physically wresting my cell phone away from me, hitting “Send,” and calling up my friend, harassing him so much that my friend actually hung up on him, fueling the certain person’s faux-fury even more. As for what happened next, like I said, these characters certainly aren’t messing around.

We were already on our way toward executing our first assignment when we finally found my friends; the Mafioso-style temper tantrum that ensued from the certain person was worth the ticket price alone, since it occurred in a certain dingy alley. Handed a set of photographs, our now-whole group had to use the images to identify certain area locations. This is almost certainly intended to be a bonding experience, for almost everyone plays a role in accomplishing the task, especially as that certain person was now gone, having melted back into the crowd. Our reward for accomplishing the task was a brief jaunt into a certain kind of retail establishment, one so whimsically rundown that to describe it would be to ruin it. Refreshed, our excitement certainly building, the group now had to hoof it to a certain street-side location where another certain individual, of uncertain nationality, gave us a certain item in a way that was certainly unexpected—one of the cleverest moments in the Accomplice experience. The receipt of this item led us to the next leg of the journey, where yet another certain person in yet another certain place did something that, yes, led us on to the next leg.

Things were getting interesting. The group was now in another public place and dealing with another very public individual; to successfully complete a certain task—one that was clearly designed to get us to the fourth leg—someone had to operate a certain kind of transportation that first came in vogue during the 19th century. As penance for being late, my friend was chosen by acclamation to perform this task, which then gave his friend an opportunity to smoke a cigarette, which he appeared to savor with certain glee. We also began sensing some differences between the various legs of the experience—that while some elements were challenging, making you feel as if you’re genuinely aiding and abetting a crime, some elements were silly, disturbing, odd and strange, not to mention rather difficult on a certain part of the lower anatomy. As we waited for my friend to return, watching the passersby watch us watching them, I wondered how I could tell anyone what Accomplice is like without giving everything away. From the look on my friend’s face, he was happy to be past his penance, while my friend’s friend was looking happily stoked on nicotine.

The fourth leg: a hilarious encounter on a certain street with a certain person dressed in a certain way, instructing our group—which had delivered to him a certain object bought from a certain vendor by means of an item picked up from the third leg of the journey—what to do to initiate the fifth leg.

The fifth leg: another hilarious encounter, but this time inside a certain establishment sitting around a certain individual who also dressed a certain way and spoke with an accent of entirely uncertain origin. It gave us, amid so much uncertainty, a break, plus a chance to devour a certain kind of edible.

And then, sure as shooting, another certain person helped us kick off the sixth leg of the journey. Our feet ached, our minds ached, but we were certainly amused.

And that brings us to the end of Accomplice, though I don’t think we were quite certain it was the end until the very last moment. This part of the experience began with the same certain person from the sixth leg, and a certain, second individual performing a certain action toward the first individual that certainly did raise some eyebrows in our group. Yet we needn’t have worried: The end of Accomplice comes most unexpectedly, proving that the only thing certain about interactive theater is its utter uncertainty. For sure.

For more information visit www.accomplicenewyork.com