Marathon Community Theatre (MCT) is located in Marathon, Florida - the heart of the Florida Keys - at 5101 Overseas Hwy (Mile Marker 49.5 Ocean Side). We are the ONLY Community Theatre located in Monroe County and house the ONLY Theatre and Cinema within a 50 mile radius.
Marathon Community Theatre is a 501(c)(3) not for profit organization that is operated by a fully volunteer Board of Directors with a small paid staff.
Beginning in 1944 as a traveling troupe called the Marathon Little Theatre, our organization held productions at restaurants, hotels, City Hall and even the local High School. For just over 50-years, tents and travel trailers assembled in parking lots acted as the Backstage where actors donned their costumes and got into their make-up. By the early nineties the MCT Board of Directors, our General Membership and the local community came together to raise the funds needed to purchase our current venue - which was Marathon's primary entertainment center originally housing the Plaza Lounge, which became the Side Door Lounge along with the Middle Keys only movie theatre - The Marathon Cinema.
Marathon Community Theatre volunteers set to work renovating the building, creating the treasured theatre you see today, opening the 1996 theatre season with Man of La Mancha in the newly opened theatre. Over the years Marathon Community Theatre has striven to create a true Cultural Arts Center, revamping the movie theatre to provide up-to-date digital films and sound (2013), paying off the original building mortgage (2016), completing major repairs sustained from Hurricane Irma (2017), installing a new digital lighting system in the theatre's main auditorium (2019) and the replacement of three commercial HVAC systems in 2020. Recently the Marathon Community Theatre retained management and staffing of the newly named Marathon Community Cinema after over twelve years of leasing to tenants. The Marathon Community Cinema reopened to the public in mid February 2021, after the cinema’s 8-month closure due to the 2020 Pandemic.
The Marathon Community Theatre offers four major main-stage productions per season (which runs August through July), fine art exhibitions in our gallery, FREE weekly dance classes for current theatre members, annual holiday events, fundraisers and variety shows, gallery and main-stage readings, guest performances and concerts, an annual community dance showcase and a six week Summer Theatre Camp for children 6 to 18 years old. Our venue seats 150, but for the 2020-2021 Season we have reduced our seating number by two thirds to a total of 50 to allow for social distancing. Until federal/state/county regulation change, face masks are also required to enter and move about the venue.
The Marathon Community Theater cast members, crew members and volunteers are unique to our area - an odd collection of boaters, postal workers, lawyers, office and retail workers, construction laborers and even a few local dolphin trainers. Membership ranges from tweens to grandmas, pigtails to balding patterns, high tops to bunions. It’s not uncommon to see an 80-year-old tap dancing across the MCT stage or a local child with unknown talent wowing the audience. All of the members on-stage and behind-the-scenes are volunteers, with an eclectic blend of loveable misfits bringing their outstanding talent to you in our little corner of paradise – The Florida Keys.
