CENTER THEATRE

The Center Theatre for the Performing Arts is a nonprofit movie theater and performance venue at 20 East Main Street in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. The main auditorium seats 264, with a second smaller auditorium of 40 seats. The theater serves as the primary entertainment venue for the Piscataquis County region.

Programming includes first-run movies, live music concerts, community theater, comedy, and youth arts programs. The venue runs summer and vacation drama camps, an after-school arts program for high school students, and an Art House Cinema Society screening series. Local and touring musical acts perform on the main stage.

The Center Theatre opened on June 13, 1940 with a one-day showing of "The Doctor Takes A Wife," originally built with a capacity of 600 seats. It closed in 1971 due to declining attendance and was essentially forgotten until 1998, when a group of local citizens formed the nonprofit Center Theatre, Inc. to restore it. The renovated theater reopened in August 2006, 66 years after its original grand opening, with reduced seating to accommodate a proper stage.