3LD Has Used Its Technology to Create a Revenue Stream When Ben Gassman's play "The Downtown Loop" opens at 3LD Art & Technology Center on Oct. 15, audiences will climb aboard a decommissioned double-decker tour bus parked inside the theater, while immersive videos of a gritty, non-idealized tour of New York City are projected around them and actors interact live with a video feed of offstage performers. Kevin Cunningham is 3-Legged Dog's executive artistic director. It's the sort of state-of-the-art multimedia hybrid that 3LD has become known for since opening its doors in the financial district in 2006. But it's not mere high-tech foolery, explained Meghan Finn, the show's director. It's about the way "the hustle that defines New York City both builds it and destroys it," she said. 3-Legged Dog, the company that runs 3LD, knows both sides of that coin as well as any troupe in town. Over the years it has had spaces knocked down, flooded (by Hurricane Sandy), and it has been threatened with eviction, while foundation and government support has fluctuated wildly. But the company has seemed to emerge stronger after each crisis. "Sometimes I think about changing the name of the company to Job," Kevin Cunningham, 3-Legged Dog's executive artistic director, said in a recent interview in his sunlit ground-floor office facing Greenwich Street, a few blocks south of the former World Trade Center site. As to the company's peculiar name, more later. This proximity to ground zero is a hint of 3-Legged Dog's outsized misfortunes: The collapse of the 47-story 7 World Trade Center tower on Sept. 11, 2001, destroyed the company's former home in nearby Fiterman Hall. Then, after navigating the politics of post-Sept. 11 relief funding and securing its current 12,500-square-foot site in a corner of the massive Battery Parking Garage, the company faced a battle with its new landlord, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, over unpaid rent, which Mr. Cunningham claimed was offset by costly, unanticipated space renovations the M.T.A. should have paid for. Eviction was only forestalled by the intervention of State Senator Daniel Squadron, who brokered a deal with the M.T.A. in which 3LD's lease was renewed through 2023. That lease deal, though, offered little help with 3-Legged Dog's biggest problem: a precipitous drop in philanthropic and public support. Mr. Cunningham said that in a single fiscal year, from 2009 to 2010, foundation support for the company dipped by 92 percent and government financing by 67 percent. Compounding the challenge is that 3LD is no mere storefront theater; its sophisticated video and computer hardware and software are expensive to maintain. Mr. Cunningham put the company's annual budget at $2.5 million and estimated his monthly operating costs to keep 3LD running at $90,000 to $125,000. Theater companies that own their spaces can rent them to outside presenters to earn so-called "passive income," and 3-Legged Dog has done its share of that. But rather than drown in the expense of keeping up all of its high-end technology, 3LD has turned its cameras, projectors and computers into its life raft. In a studio next to Mr. Cunningham's office after the interview, three young men were flitting among a bank of monitors while a holographic-looking image of a rotating globe hovered over a small stage area. This is 3LD's "nerd nest," and its more-or-less nonstop research-and-development regimen is a key to the company's new business plan, which has managed to replace much of that lost donation income with revenue from outside projects. These have included creating video installations for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, for a Lady Gaga book launch, and for an event next spring in Shanghai to introduce Michael Kors's fashion to the Chinese market. Lest these sound like craven work-for-hire gigs, Mr. Cunningham was quick to insist that they're "right in our wheelhouse" and are consistent with the company's vision. "Part of our mission is to create new tools and methods that help artists work across disciplines," said Mr. Cunningham, who in his company's early days financed development of the integrative live-video software, Isadora, that would become widely used in the industry. Every project we've done so far stretches us aesthetically and technologically. The Kors event, he added, would involve "one of the biggest curved video screens ever built." Besides, his lawyers tell him, "As long as all the money goes back to the nonprofit, there shouldn't be a problem."