Four years after the Buffalo Sabres skated off to nearby HSBC Arena, Memorial Auditorium has sprung back to life as a painter's paradise. At least that's how Studio Arena Theatre's scenic artists feel about the cavernous old sports palace on Lower Main Street, where sawhorses and pieces of the scenery for the upcoming play "Italian American Reconciliation" sit atop dropcloths where center ice used to be. What others may remember as a dingy, smoke-stained Depression-era fossil, "we call home," said Marjorie Pantera, a member of the Studio Arena crew. This is the fourth set they have painted in the Aud since the city unlocked the door and switched on the lights for them last fall.
To understand their fondness for the homely place, you should know a little about the lot of the scenic artist.
"We're a bit nomadic," explained Michael Sprada, another Studio Arena hand.
Unlike many older playhouses, the Main Street stage lacks a paint rack, where hanging backdrops can be painted in place by moving up and down on a platform. So resident artists Pantera, Sprada and Doug Moody always dream of finding an open horizontal space large enough to accommodate pieces of scenery that can be 40 to 70 feet long.
"In Buffalo," Sprada said, "everything is steel columns, 231/2 feet apart. You just can't create 70-foot drops in that kind of space."
The quest has taken them to such places as the Tri-Main Center - Trico Products' former Main Street plant - and 747 Main when it was empty, before the Buffalo Foundation moved in.
No wonder they have fallen in love with the Aud, the "old friend" the Sabres left behind on April 14, 1996.
Even paradise has an occasional cloudburst, however.
Trying to work while the Buffalo Police canine patrol trained in the empty hallways above one day was "kind of spooky," Pantera said. Then there was the day the artists found the floor littered with shell casings, apparently after police had used the Aud as an indoor firing range. And then there was the time a bat swooped down from the rafters to lick a freshly painted scene.
All of that open space is worth a few distractions, the painters say - especially if things like the stage for "Reconciliation," an imitation terrazzo courtyard 26 feet in diameter, can be laid out, stenciled and trimmed in one piece.
Like the rest of the staging for this romantic comedy set in New York City's Little Italy, the stage is meant to suggest "leftover scenery from a grand opera production," said set designer Robert Cothran, who travels from his Knoxville, Tenn., home about once a year to work with old friend Gavin Cameron-Webb, Studio Arena artistic director.
He and the others hope they can keep their makeshift studio indefinitely.
If nobody comes up with an imaginative plan for the old arena any time soon, "that would be fine with me," Pantera said.