Untitled Theater Company No. 61 Presents MONEY LAB at HERE; Performances Begin Today

Untitled Theater Company No. 61 has announced 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 tonight, Friday, March 20 for a limited engagement through Saturday, April 11. Press Opening is Monday, March 23 at 7 PM. The performance schedule varies. 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?