Hello out there in Internet-Land! Lory Henning, here, and I’ve taken it upon myself to spread some enviro-sustainability love and education over to a darling little theater here in the West Village called Manhattan Theatre Source (as you might have guessed from the title of this post). What will transpire upon this blog is an account of my travails and (I hope) many successes along the road to making MTS a much more environmentally friendly place.

For some background on how this came about, let me just start with the fact that I’m really into Podcasts. I love them and have been getting nearly all of my current events, science, language, and cultural education from them ever since I first discovered them. So there I was, watching my video podcasts when all of a sudden, I saw one from Green TV about the Arcola Theatre in London and how it was the world’s first carbon neutral theatre. Now you can take issue with that statement if you’d like; I don’t know that they actually compared their carbon footprint with those of every other theatre in the entire world. However, they looked like they had done their homework to me. First of all, the theatre was a converted factory (reusing the original building. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - that’s the second R). Then there was the fact that they had a hydrogen powered fuel cell running all of the electricity in the space (the bar, concessions, and the theatre). That’s right. I said they had a FUEL CELL powering their space! AND, they had a low-consumption LED theatrical lighting system in their theatre!!

Well, I happened to have a show which I had directed (sweet little thing called Kitty and Lina, by Manuel Igrejas - you should have seen it) running at MTS at that time, and I started to think Arcola… Source… Arcola… Source - not unlike Melanie Griffith in Working Girl saying “Trask… radio… Trask… radio…”. And then one morning while I was in the shower, it popped into my head that I could offer 2 measly hours a week after work to MTS to help them green their place up. I called Lanie, the managing director, made the pitch, and here I am!

On my first day, I set about working to establish a benchmark of where the theatre is now - some foundational figure that would be the baseline against which we could measure all of our future successes.  That’s right, I gathered up 2007’s electricity bills and went to www.terrapass.com to determine our carbon footprint:

Manhattan Theatre Source produces 181 metric tons of carbon per year.

So, that’s where we’re starting.  Next time, I’ll be discussing our initial efforts to cut the energy bills (and energy consumption) of the theatre.

Until then, if you’d like to have a look, Manhattan Theatre Source can be found on the web at: http://theatresource.org.

Lory Henning over and out.