Senator Fatigue Hits In Latest Push To Save Cinematic Gem

It's an elegant little word that ends any number of dramas, from Othello to the Merchant of Venice to - who knows - maybe even High School Musical.

Exeunt.

The common stage direction, the actors' cue to exit a scene, is Latin for, "They go out."

In real life, though, exits tend not to be so simple. Lights don't fade to black, curtains don't fall with finality, the dramatis personae may go rogue and simply refuse to exit, stage left or right.

So it went on Wednesday, when the long-running drama of Baltimore's Senator Theatre headed not necessarily toward its final conclusion, but at least the end of one act. Having teetered on the brink of closure for years as a result its owner's mounting debt, the Senator was going to auction.

That was the script, at least, but to no one's surprise, the lead character, owner Tom Kiefaber, was not going to follow it.

He'd signaled as much in the previous weeks, on the theater's marquee that increasingly served not only as a promo of what the Senator was showing that week but also for the id of its owner.

Whatever was on his mind at any point in time came to find expression there, in lights and in all capital letters - such a battle with the city councilman representing the theater's North Baltimore District, Bill Henry, and his belief that the auction was "RUSSIAN ROULETTE OR A RIGGED SHAM."

Actually, it was neither. It was essentially another auction happening at a time when all sorts of mortgages are going unpaid and all sorts of properties are going into foreclosure. In fact, as I drove up to Senator on Wednesday, I passed the usual crowd of cell-phone-wielding, eye-contact-avoiding investors that was forming on the steps of the Mitchell Courthouse downtown, site of seemingly daily foreclosure auctions.

The Senator being the Senator, though, there's always going to be some kind of drama - and not just on its wide screen.

After Kiefaber got behind on a loan from 1st Mariner Bank, the city of Baltimore bought the theater's mortgage for nearly $1 million in May. The city's expenditure - not uncontroversial, given its current budgetary squeeze - saved the Senator from a bank foreclosure auction, and Kiefaber from losing his house that had been put up as collateral for the theater loan. The city might have expected some gratitude for that - but, then having dealt with Kiefaber over the years, maybe it wasn't holding its breath.