We've all felt the panic caused by a dead cellphone battery. One New York man took that impulse a step further last week when he crawled onto a Broadway stage to plug in his phone.

The incident took place just before the start of a July 2 production of Hand to God, according to Playbill. It was all captured in the following video.

His desperate bid for power was for naught -- the outlet he used was actually part of the play's set.

Even if the outlet had been real, the stage-jumper would not have secured much juice. Theatregoer Chris York noted in a Facebook post that the crew removed his phone soon after it was plugged in.

"I took great joy in loudly heckling the idiot when he returned to take his phone back," York wrote after the show. "Has theatre etiquette - heck, Common Sense - really fallen that far??"

"The whole time it was very bizarre," York told the Guardian.

York's hardly the only one to note that the man's behaviour didn't exactly match the required etiquette.

Two actors in Hand to God later noted the event on Twitter.

Actors from the play also reenacted the stunt.

The Tony-nominated Hand to God is a comedy about a monstrous puppet that challenges the faith and harmony of a small Texas community. Beowulf Boritt, the show's set designer, purposely tried to make the props and space feel real.

"We did a lot of research as to what church basements look like. You look around a real room and there are electrical outlets, fire extinguishers, things like that," he said to Vanity Fair.

"It's certainly the first time anyone has gone onto one of my sets and tried to use it as a real space."

There may be one benefit to the much-mocked affair. As Ken Neil Hailey noted in another Guardian article, "people outside of the Broadway bubble are actually talking about a play."

The production has already started using the incident in an ad.