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Going Green Can Mean Saving Green for Innovative Theatres
From new building construction to making small changes in daily operations, theatres are saving money and gaining positive reactions from patrons and the press
The sort of people who ply their trade in the theatre are generally the same sort who embrace conservational and environmental causes-people seeking to enrich human understanding and make the world a better place.
Exactly how to go about embracing these goals while plying one’s trade, however, can be a bit of a conundrum.
“Right now, the way theatre production exists in the world is built around an ecologically unsustainable model,” notes Ian Garrett, a student at the California Institute of the Arts who is helping develop a sustainable theatre curriculum. “Things go up for such a limited time that it becomes more about ‘I need it for this amount of time, and I need it to be cheap.’ Looking at things that last a long time doesn’t necessarily factor into it.”
As if to underscore our discipline’s potential wastefulness, England’s The Guardian newspaper ran a story last year about the ecological damage caused by theatrical tours that asked if theatre may not be “the eco-vandal of the arts world.”
That’s not to say that great advances are not being made. In October 2006, Oregon’s Portland Center Stage opened the Gerding Theater at the Armory, the first performing arts facility in the country to achieve a LEED-platinum rating for its inherent use of sustainability in its structure and operations. This past October, London’s National Theatre announced a five-year partnership with Royal Philips Electronics to replace entirely their internal and external lighting systems, with the hoped-for result of energy savings as high as seventy percent and cost savings of about 100,000 pounds per year. Back on this side of the Atlantic, the New York Theatre Workshop is currently preparing to break ground on that state’s first certified GREEN urban industrial building, which will be ready for use in 2009.
When the folks at Portland Center Stage set out to develop a theatre of their own, creating a groundbreaking ecological facility was the last thing on their minds.
“Like everybody in Portland, we were aware of, and supportive of, green buildings,” says the theatre’s general manager Creon Thorne. “But we didn’t think it would apply to theatre design and construction. We were primarily focused on creating a great performance space for our company.”
The historic local armory they decided on for their new space came with numerous tax credits, and it was their partnering with the city that led to the pursuit of LEED certification. Upon learning of this, though, Thorne was more concerned than ecstatic, as he was unsure how this would affect the company’s productions. “We thought, does this mean we’re going to have to have 100-watt light bulbs in our stage lights, or salmon runs in the lobby?” he says. “We were on board with the concept, but skeptical about how it would impact theater design. Would it limit the kind of stage lighting fixtures we could use? Would the ventilation or energy requirements, or heating and cooling restrictions, impact our audience’s experience or our ability to put on shows?”
As it turns out, the company’s stagecraft was ultimately unaffected by the theater’s conservational structure. (They also benefited from LEED’s newness, according to Thorne, as the certification deals mostly with things like HVAC, office lighting, and water-saving systems while basically ignoring more theatrically-specific details like stage lighting and process loads.)
In the end, the project was approximately revenue neutral, with the higher cost of attaining LEED certification largely offset by lower utility bills and water usage. The certification had no negative impact on the company’s productions but the very positive effect of attracting interest from new audiences. “So many people got excited about the building who may not have cared about theatre but cared about historic preservation or sustainable building,” Thorne says. “The green building gave us another story to tell and access to people who wouldn’t normally support a theatre project.”
This resulted in both PR and attendance windfalls for Portland Center Stage. Articles were written not only in design and construction trade magazines but The Wall Street Journal as well, and the facility saw frequent tours from architectural convention attendees and green building groups. Best of all, the theatre has been breaking its own box office records since its October 2006 opening-even though the actual performance space is smaller than the one they left.
Once inside the new venue, however, Portland Center Stage faced the same challenges as other theatres in figuring out how to make their everyday operations greener. To that end, says Thorne, they formed a “greening the theatre” committee and have instituted changes such as joining their city’s composting program; banning spray paint; instituting carpool and bike parking policies that have led to 65-75 percent alternative transportation use; using non-toxic cleaning materials for their janitorial staff; and substituting flyer mailings with E-Mail blasts whenever possible.
While most theatre companies won’t have the luxury of a new, LEED-certified building, many are learning that saving the environment every day is easier than some might think.
“Many of the environmental challenges that face theatres are only variations of the challenges that face many other types of businesses,” says Robert Butler, a British arts journalist who specializes in environmental issues. “People forget that theatres are running all day. One stat that's often bandied around is that more energy is used by the lighting in a theatre during the day than by the lighting in the evening.”
The Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company in San Diego was founded with social consciousness in mind, paying equity wages to local actors and choosing scripts that included diverse casts and subject matter. But it was only upon seeing “An Inconvenient Truth” that Seema Sueko, the company’s artistic director and co-founder, realized the need for a grander change in their everyday practices.
“After seeing An Inconvenient Truth, it struck me as a little hypocritical that theatre as it’s traditionally practiced can often be damaging to the environment,” says Sueko, who held extensive conversations with her board and various LEED-accredited professionals and came up with a series of guidelines for streamlining their operations.
Unsurprisingly, she found that the quickest and easiest ways a theatre could make its operations ecologically friendly involved smaller, everyday changes.
“It was very easy to put recycling bins in all our venues, from the office to the rehearsal room to the theatre,” she says, noting that this very basic action held an unanticipated benefit. “Audiences appreciate it,” she says. “They actually buy more tickets because they feel like they’re supporting a company that’s supporting their interest in the environment.”
The theatre searched for ways to replace their basic office supplies with more environmentally-friendly alternatives and found GreenLine Paper (greenlinepaper.com), a Pennsylvania company that sells environmentally friendly office products through their web site. “Everything is made with post-consumer waste,” says Sueko, who notes that even GreenLine’s cups are made not from plastic but from PLA-processed yellow corn that is fully biodegradable.
Sueko also sought out alternate materials for environmentally damaging theatre staples like toxic paint and vinyl banners. She found a California company called ASM Safecoat that provided non-toxic paint for the sets and a local company called Quantum Digital Imaging (qdimaging.com) that created banners with ECO Satin-based inks-water-based inks that make the banners degrade much more quickly over time.
While the decision to switch to the new processes was an environmental slam dunk, the cost tested the company’s convictions. “A $130 banner now became $450,” she says. “We decided ultimately to do it, mostly because we wanted to put our money where our mouth is, and let people know about it so that it would drive the cost down.” Of course, while Sueko found companies local to her for these functions, most cities now have similar resources at their disposal.
Another essential opportunity for ecological consciousness is energy efficiency in stage operations. Garrett, who approaches the topic from backgrounds in architecture and lighting design, says that one of the key things theatres can do to save the planet is simply maintain their equipment.
“One of the things that tends to happen, especially in small theatres, is that lighting equipment gets abused and knocked around, which takes away their efficiency,” he says. “That’s one of the easiest things to do, and that goes for any equipment or technology in general-better maintained stuff is going to work better and use energy a lot more efficiently.”
Both Garrett and Sueko also talked about how, in general, environmental concern means more specific planning further in advance than many theatres are used to.
“One of the failings of the way theatre is produced in this country is that there’s so much emphasis on the show as opposed to the process,” Garrett says, using the example of lighting designers creating a broad stage wash instead of taking the time in rehearsal to figure out exact light placement.
“We try to make decisions earlier than usual because we need to find other options,” adds Sueko. “We need to know how much paint we need so we can get it in time. We need the time to find recycled platforms, to borrow things from other folks and then think about where it’s going to go after it spends four weeks on our stage, making sure there’s an exit plan for all the items.”
Networking with other theater companies is an excellent way to recycle resources. “If theatres are talking to each other and each knows what everybody has, it’s like, ‘well, let’s not build another platform,’” says Garrett. “This other person has a platform-maybe we can adapt what they already have.’”
Sharing resources is also a great way to cut costs. All in all, as with Thorne, Sueko cited the costs of going green as about even but says that the benefit in terms of publicity and new audiences was huge. “Last year, for our first show under our new guidelines, we sent out a press release to the Society of Environmental Journalists,” she says, “and that picked up a lot of press and led to a lot of green meet-up groups coming to our show.”
Everyone we spoke with agreed that the benefits of going green far outweighed any potential costs. It seemed clear that as a new, younger generation learns about conservation from an earlier age and as more and more people understand its importance, going green-even in a discipline seemingly suited to waste-will be easier than ever.
“A lot of young theatre artists who are graduating now are interested in this,” says Sueko. “I feel like it’s the beginning of a big shift in how we practice theatre because the generation coming into the workforce now has made it a priority.”
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©2007 Dramabiz Magazine. All Rights Reserved.