"A safe outlet for teenagers." That's how Whole Backstage Theatre describes its own beginning, and the wording is not an accident. It wasn't founded as a place to put on plays. In the early 1970s, three local youths were killed in a car crash, and the adults who responded to that loss built something for the teenagers left behind: a teen club aimed at giving young people constructive things to do together. The plays came later, almost as a byproduct of keeping kids busy and connected.
By 1985 that teen club had grown enough to incorporate as a nonprofit under a new name, The Whole Backstage. Half a century on, it holds a title few Alabama towns can claim: the oldest continuously operating community theatre in the state, and the only one in Marshall County. It runs out of a building that started life as an elementary school in 1926.
A Rock Schoolhouse, Repurposed
The theatre sits at 1120 Rayburn Ave, an easy walk from Gunter Avenue and the rest of downtown Guntersville. The building itself predates the organization by nearly fifty years. Constructed in 1926 in an American Craftsman style with a rock facade, it served as a school until the 1970s, when the district moved out and the fledgling theatre group moved in. Today the same stone walls hold a 337-seat auditorium, and the lobby and hallways are lined with playbills and posters going back decades, a kind of running scrapbook of every show the town has put on since.
Built to Run Without Payroll
Whole Backstage has no paid staff. Every actor, set builder, stage manager, and box office volunteer donates their time, and the organization's funding comes from a mix of grants, most notably from the Marshall County Foundation of Fine Arts and the Alabama State Arts Council, with the majority of support coming directly from patrons and the community. That funding model shapes what a season looks like. A typical year at Whole Backstage includes:
- Four mainstage productions running across the year
- One or two holiday shows in addition to the regular season
- An annual summer musical staffed and performed largely by teenagers
- A Black Box Theatre venue for smaller or more experimental work
- A standing youth theatre department that runs year-round, not just in summer
The organization reports drawing on more than 15,000 volunteer hours in a given year, with over 400 people directly involved as cast, crew, or board members, and total audiences exceeding 8,000. Put those two numbers side by side and something becomes clear. A theatre that puts 400 people to work to reach 8,000 in attendance isn't just a venue a fraction of the town shows up to watch. A meaningful slice of the county has personally built a set, hemmed a costume, or stood under the lights there at some point. That's a different relationship to a building than most small-town cultural institutions get, and it's the reason a volunteer model with no box-office pressure to cover salaries has lasted this long in a town this size.
Longtime member Andy Hunter calls Dot Moore "the Founding Mother of the Whole Backstage." Dot Moore served multiple terms as president of the theatre's board and later of the Mountain Valley Arts Council, and her decades of unpaid work in local arts earned her the Alabama Governor's Award for Volunteers in the Arts and Humanities in 1988 and the Alabama State Council on the Arts' Bill Bates Award in 2004, an honor given to people who have worked in the arts without expecting anything back for it. For a theatre that depends entirely on volunteers, bringing new people into the fold is an ongoing part of its story.
The Same Few Downtown Blocks Are Busy This Fall
Whole Backstage is currently in its 2026-2027 season, the 53rd since that first teen club met in 1973. It isn't running in isolation. Within a few blocks of the Rayburn Avenue building, Guntersville's Downtown Merchants Association is hosting the Lake City FallFest on October 9 and 10, 2026, at Errol Allan Park, with an artisans market on Taylor Street, food trucks, and live music running both days. Later in the month, the Mountain Valley Arts Council brings singer-songwriter Tosha Hill to the same park on October 29 for one of its outdoor concerts, with Leena's Rolling Kitchen handling concessions. The Downtown Merchants Association returns to Errol Allan Park again on December 5 for its annual Night Before Christmas celebration, featuring performances by area bands and school choirs alongside carriage rides and a visit from Santa.
None of that is coincidence so much as accumulation. A handful of volunteer-run organizations, the theatre, the arts council, and the merchants association, have spent decades building programming around the same few downtown blocks, and the result is a fall calendar with more free live entertainment within walking distance than a town this size would otherwise generate on its own. Whole Backstage is the oldest thread in that pattern, and its youth summer musical and children's theatre department aren't recent additions bolted onto an aging institution. They're the original mission, the same one that started the whole thing after that car crash in the 1970s, still running under a different name five decades later.
You can find current show dates and ticket information directly through Whole Backstage's own site.
If you've sat in that 337-seat auditorium or waited in the lobby studying fifty years of playbills before a show, you already know what makes it worth the drive downtown. Cary and Chrystal at Lowery Real Estate Group have spent plenty of Friday nights in those same seats, and if you're ever curious about a home within walking distance of Rayburn Avenue, we'd be glad to talk about what's out there.
