The latest experiment in New York theater is taking place in a tiny, L-shaped third-floor room with water-stained ceilings and dirty gray carpeting that served for decades as a dumping ground for old props. At 8:05 p.m. on a recent Saturday, seven musicians, squeezed nearly knee to knee there in the Lucille Lortel Theater, struck the opening chords to the musical “Carrie,” as the actors stepped onstage two floors below.

It was music by remote control: an orchestra playing not from the traditional pit wedged between audience and stage, but from a distant room or even a separate building. It’s an approach that appeals to some producers because it allows them to sell high-priced tickets to more choice seats, or to use the old pit space for bigger and fancier stage sets — and because technology means they can.

Artistic communication comes through speakers and television monitors. It can be a challenge.

At “Carrie,” the conductor that night, Paul Staroba, waited for a red light to blink by his piano keyboard to signal the start of Act I. “O.K., we’re gonna go,” he yelled. Just above the light was a 16-inch monitor showing a black-and-white view of the Lortel stage, where the grainy outlines of actors began to appear. The video quality was too poor to see the precise movements of lips, but the musicians upstairs had trained for weeks to know every beat of the singing without visual cues. The ensemble’s two keyboards and three guitars were barely audible, their sound pumped through speakers in the theater; only the cello and drums provided a road map to the score of “Carrie” in the old storage room.

“All we can really do is hope that we sound good,” Mr. Staroba said during a lull between songs. “You miss feeling the actors breathe a few feet away from you, to sense where they will start and end each song. But doing this for eight performances a week, I think we get the music pretty precise with what the cast is doing.”