In her Thesis, Lianna detailed the wasteful practices that theatre companies use to produce theatre. These range from energy inefficient lighting solutions to the wasteful use of building materials. Lianna proposed a theatre company that takes steps to ensure sustainability and encourages green practices.
On March 1st, 2016, after graduating from Towson University with a Bachelor of Science in Theatre Studies and beginning her graduate career at Notre Dame of Maryland University in Non-Profit Management, Lianna founded The Green Globe Theatre. She enlisted the help of fellow students and graduates from The Community College of Baltimore County and Towson University to make The Green Globe a reality.
At The Green Globe Theatre, we aim to cultivate a theatrical environment in which all aspects of design and production are renewable and sustainable in order to provide economically- and environmentally-friendly theatre that is accessible to all. What that means is that we are constantly analyzing the ways in which theatre is made and making those practices more in line with a modern, environmentally-friendly mindset.
Despite being a fledgling community theatre company with limited resources, The Green Globe has already enacted many green initiatives. For instance, we use an entirely paperless ticketing and program system, obtain many of our props, costumes, and furniture pieces second-hand, make use of recycling programs like Freecycle and The Loading Dock to acquire building materials, format our scripts to use as little paper as possible (the script we created for our production of Hamlet used only 24 pages per script), and connect with other local theatre companies to share resources and recycle materials from show strikes.
All of those are just the beginning, though. As we build our company, increase our budget, and eventually move into our own space, The Green Globe Theatre will expand its initiatives to make use of solar energy, use LED stage lights to reduce power consumption, recycle and harvest water to reduce waste, incorporate handheld technologies to further reduce paper waste, build our HVAC system to be self-sufficient and sustainable, provide incentives to our patrons to make their own lives a little greener, and many other green initiatives. In addition, The Green Globe Theatre hopes to make education and community outreach major parts of our mission. We not only want to make our own company environmentally-friendly, but everybody's lives as well. With a team of educators and community outreach specialists, we plan on spreading our knowledge to everyone who wants to change the way we impact our environment. Many of the green technologies and practices we will incorporate have practical, house-hold applications as well. We will strike to make them understandable and accessible to all.
With our bright team of theatre-makers, plans to become a non-profit theatre company, and devotion to sustainability, The Green Globe Theatre will set the groundwork for how theatre needs to be produced in the 21st century.
