Our History

On June 9, 1946, an ad appeared in the Asheville Citizen Times inviting the community to come together and create a community theatre. That call sparked the merging of The Asheville Little Theater, The Players Guild, and the Asheville Theater Guild into what would soon become Asheville Community Theatre.

Just over a month later, on July 17, 1946, ACT launched its first membership campaign at Bon Marche department store downtown. Mrs. Anita Coggins was the very first to sign up! Since this was our organization’s first engagement with the community, it is the moment we mark as our official birthday!

On August 17, 1946, ACT opened its very first production: Dark of the Moon, a tragic Appalachian love story that set the stage for nearly eight decades of storytelling. And just a few months after that, a young Charlton Heston and his wife Lydia Clarke arrived from New York to co-direct ACT’s third production. They stayed to direct several more, including a the first performance of The Glass Menagerie in a non-professional theatre. Heston would later credit his time in Asheville as pivotal to his decision to become a professional actor.

Asheville Community Theatre has been delighting audiences with high quality performances since 1946, making us the oldest continuously operating theatre in Asheville and the 2nd oldest in the state of North Carolina.