Tacoma Actors Guild has closed its doors, failing to finish its first season as a "new" and "restructured" organization.

Tacoma's only professional theater first closed its doors a year ago to restructure itself and pay off a $400,000 debt it had accumulated over a four-year stretch. It then emerged last spring with a series of shows it staged through a partnership with Bellevue Civic Theatre.

TAG's production of "Proof" was the first show it staged on its own this season, and it will apparently be its last. The show closed along with the theater over the weekend despite efforts to raise money through a creative "Hit List" viral donation campaign. The donations weren't apparently enough to sustain the 300-seat theater's $25,000-a-month payroll and expense budget.

Calls to the theater went unanswered, although it's volunteer playwright in residence Bryan Willis confirmed the closure, noting that the closure should not be seen as a indicator that Tacoma won't support theater.

Willis' Northwest Playwrights Alliance performed staged readings at TAG once a month and routinely had more than 100 people in the audience.

"If you get 100 people in for a reading you are doing something right," Willis says. "Our audiences would put any theater in Seattle to shame."

News of the closure was first posted on Exit133.com, where there is an ongoing discussion about theater in the South Sound. â€" Steve Dunkelberger