Untitled Theater Company No. 61 is thrilled to announce the premiere of the fully realized economic vaudeville MONEY LAB, originally workshopped at the Brick, conceived and curated by UTC Artistic Director Edward Einhorn. MONEY LAB begins performances on Friday, March 20 for a limited engagement through Saturday, April 11. Press Opening is Monday, March 23 at 7 PM. The performance schedule varies (see complete schedule below). Performances take place at HERE (145 6th Avenue; enter on Dominick, one block south of Spring). The regular ticket price is $20 (plus a required $5 - $10 buy-in). There are two $50 premium seats available for each performance. For tickets, call OvationTix on 212-352-3101 or visit www.here.org. For more information, visit http://www.untitledtheater.com.
MONEY LAB is an economic vaudeville, a multi-disciplinary experiment to discover whether economic ideas can be represented through performance. Mixing theater, story-telling, dance, video, cabaret, opera, puppetry, clowning, and games, MONEY LAB explores everything from the gold standard, to the 2008 stock market collapse, to the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Mark, Arthur Laffer, and Elinor Ostrom, to the intersections of economics and art.
Among the elements presented during the evening will be audience participatory games based on economic behavioral experiments, including auctions, The Dictator Game, and The Ultimatum Game, developed with the help of Game Play curator Gyda Arber and economist Rosemarie Nagel; and a number of rotating acts (four each performance) on various fiscal subjects.
Upon entering, audience members will be required to purchase five dollars worth of tokens that to use during the games. Red and blue tokens represent the conflicting economies of food vs. flowers (basic needs vs. beauty/art). The results of the games will change the value of the tokens during the course of the evening, and the fluctuating exchange rates will be posted throughout. Two central questions of the evening are: how do we value art, and can it be measured on an economic scale?
Untitled Theater Company #61 (UTC61) is a Theater of Ideas: scientific, political, philosophical, and above all, theatrical. Recent work includes The Pig, or Václav Havel's Hunt for a Pig (3LD, Critics Pick for The New York Times and The Village Voice); The God Projekt (La MaMa, Critics Pick for Time Out New York and winner of Best Performance Art Production, NYIT Awards); and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (3LD, Critics Pick for The New York Times and Time Out New York). Other notable projects include the NEUROfest (plays about neurology), the Václav Havel Festival, the Ionesco Festival, and the Off-Broadway production of Fairy Tales of the Absurd ("almost unbearably funny" - The New York Times).
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