"After 46 years, we're facing possibly closing permanently."
Beverly Dahlstrom said that in November 2020, when The Marco Players had a couple thousand dollars left in the bank and a season of shows still to mount. She was the theater's executive-artistic director, and the company she was trying to save had been staging plays in the same storefront at Marco Town Center Mall since 1974. It survived that scare. Then, two years later, with no pandemic left to blame, it closed anyway.
If you've lived on Marco Island for a while, you probably still call it "the Marco Players" out of habit when you mention Saturday night plans. That's understandable. The room is the same. The seats are the same eighty-three of them. What's different is who runs the place, what it costs to sit in one of those seats, and what's actually scheduled between now and next spring, and most residents I talk to haven't caught up on any of it.
The Ending Nobody Announced
COVID hit The Marco Players hard and specifically. Two productions from the 2019-2020 season, a run of "Born Yesterday" and the season closer "Sylvia," got cut short by shutdown orders, and the company lost an estimated $75,000 in ticket revenue it had budgeted around. That's what pushed Dahlstrom to launch the Staying Alive Campaign, asking the community for $50,000 just to open the next season.
The island responded. Staying Alive brought in $67,305, beating its own target, and a second push called Staying Afloat added another $43,650. The company announced its 2021-2022 season under the banner "Roaring Back," its 48th, with tickets running $34 to $39.50 and two new plays from local playwrights on the bill. It looked like the story had a happy ending.
Instead, sometime in early 2022, The Marco Players decided not to renew its lease at the mall and stopped producing shows. There was no dramatic announcement, no final curtain call covered by the local paper. The organization that had just clawed its way back from a six-figure pandemic hole simply didn't come back for another season. If you go looking for it today, the old website still exists as an archive, and it says plainly that the theater has closed and is no longer selling tickets.
What Filled the Room
The Marco Island Center for the Arts, the nonprofit that's run the gallery and classroom space on North Collier Boulevard since 1970, decided the island shouldn't lose a community theater along with a theater company. Hyla Crane, the Center's executive director, has explained that the board looked at the situation and worried there would be no community theater with its own home on Marco Island if they didn't step in. So they expanded their own mission and created a new company, the Arts Center Theatre, and moved it into the exact unit The Marco Players had vacated.
The result is a genuinely different organization wearing the old room. Here's the practical comparison, since the two get conflated constantly in casual conversation:
| The Marco Players (through 2022) | Arts Center Theatre (now) | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 1089 N. Collier Blvd., Marco Town Center Mall | Same storefront |
| Parent organization | Independent 501(c)(3) | Program of Marco Island Center for the Arts |
| Season length | Roughly Nov to April, varying by year | Nov to April, five mainstage shows |
| Ticket price | $34 to $39.50 (2021-2022) | $35 members / $40 non-members |
| Season package | Individual show sales | $175 members / $200 non-members |
| Box office | 239-642-7270 (defunct) | 239-784-1186 |
The Arts Center Theatre's first season ran in 2022-2023 with six productions, and it's kept a similar pace every year since. If you've been meaning to buy tickets and you called the old number, that's likely why nobody picked up.
What's Actually Happening Right Now
Before the mainstage season opens, the Center is running its annual link to a much bigger event. The Manhattan Short Film Festival lands on Marco Island from September 24 through October 4, 2026, its 29th year. It's a genuinely global event, over 100,000 film lovers across 500-plus cities watching the same slate of finalist short films in the same window and voting on a winner, and Marco Island's screening is part of that same worldwide ballot.
A few weeks later, on October 14 at 11 a.m., the Center hosts the first Art Talk of the season, with artist and educator Rob Eder walking through what makes work by Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, John Frederick Peto, and Jasper Johns distinctly American. It's a lecture format, not a performance, and it's a good low-commitment way to see the building before committing to a theater membership.
The 2026-2027 Season, Already on Sale
The Arts Center Theatre's new mainstage season is up on its box office page now, and two shows already have full listings:
- December 9-20, 2026: A comedy by Patricia Kane, directed by Amy Saad, following the members of a Midwestern women's club building their annual holiday parade float while old grudges and secrets surface underneath the pleasant surface.
- January 7-24, 2027: A thriller by Ira Levin, directed by Paula Keenan, centered on a once-successful Connecticut playwright of Broadway thrillers running out of both luck and money.
The Center also sells a separate membership tier, the Golden Comedy Circle, built around a slate of twelve comedy shows for the 2026-2027 season, distinct from the five-show mainstage package. That's a bigger comedy lineup than the mainstage alone, and it sells to members before the general public gets a shot at it.
None of this requires advance planning the way a snowbird season rental does, but the room seats eighty-three people. Shows that ran well under the old Marco Players name used to sell out regularly, and there's no reason to think an eighty-three-seat house gets easier to book once word gets around that tickets are back on sale.
Why the Distinction Actually Matters
This isn't a story about a theater closing and reopening under new management, the way a restaurant might. It's a story about an institution that survived the exact crisis that was supposed to kill it, then disappeared anyway for reasons that had nothing to do with COVID, and got quietly rebuilt by a different nonprofit before most of the island noticed the gap. If you're still telling out-of-town guests to look up "the Marco Players" for a show, you're sending them to a dead phone number and an archived website.
The Center for the Arts building at 1089 N. Collier Blvd. is worth knowing on its own terms now: a working art gallery, a lecture series, a film festival tied to a global event every fall, and a theater company running a full season under its own name. Check marcoislandart.org before you assume a show's sold out or a series has ended. The room hasn't gone anywhere. The name on the door has.
If Marco Island's mix of quiet institutions and quiet change is the kind of local detail you want more of, before you ever need it for a move, that's exactly what MJ Team writes up for the neighborhoods we work in every day.
