STAGE TUBE: First Look at Jane McGonigal, Jennifer Haley and More in CTG's THE NETHER

Center Theatre Group presents a discussion between the visionary game designer, futurist and bestselling author of "Reality is Broken," Jane McGonigal, and playwright Jennifer Haley, winner of the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, at the Veterans Memorial Building in Culver City, Friday, March 8 at 8 p.m. Admission is free, but seating is limited and reservations are required.

Inspired by Haley's new play at CTG's Kirk Douglas Theatre, "The Nether," a thriller about an online realm in the not too distant future, McGonigal and Haley will discuss the implications of the increasing amount of time spent in virtual worlds in what some have termed a "mass exodus" from offline existence. Are these experiences fulfilling genuine human needs? How are lives, experiences and relationships affected by this migration?

Jennifer Haley is an accomplished playwright, and has had plays produced at major festivals around the country including "Neighborhood 3: Requistion of Doom" at the Humana Festival of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville and "Breadcrumbs" at the American Contemporary Theatre Festival. She has also held residencies with the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, Page 73 Production/Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the MacDowell Colony. Additionally, she was a part of CTG's 2011-2012 Writers' Workshop. Jennifer was the winner of the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for "The Nether."

Jane McGonigal, Ph.D, is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games and bestselling author of"Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World." The inventor and co-founder of "SuperBetter," a game that has helped more than 200,000 players tackle real-life health challenges such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury, she has created and deployed award-winning games, sports and secret missions in more than 30 countries on six continents, for partners such as the American Heart Association, the International Olympics Committee, the World Bank Institute and the New York Public Library.

McGonigal specializes in games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, such as poverty, hunger and climate change, through planetary-scale collaboration. Her best-known work includes "EVOKE," "Superstruct, "World Without Oil," "Cruel 2 B Kind," "Find the Future" and "The Lost Ring." She has served as theDirector of Games Research & Development at theInstitute for the Future, a non-profit research group in Palo Alto, California. Her research focuses on how games are transforming the way we lead our real lives, and how they can be used to increase our resilience and well-being and her future forecasting work has been featured in The Economist,Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, O(prah) Magazine, Fast Companyand The New York Times. She is the founder of Gameful, "a secret headquarters for world-changing game developers," and has taught classes in game design and game theory at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute.

This event is part of Sandbox @ CTG, a program that offers an opportunity for audiences to meet commissioned artists and their collaborators at the very infancy of a new piece of theatre.

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