Taper’s Puzo Bids Farewell to Los Angeles; Meyer Takes First Prize in SCR Contest

Wave goodby. Madeline Puzo, associate producer of the Mark Taper Forum and head of Taper, Too since 1983, has accepted the position of associate artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis beginning April 3. Taper officials have not selected a replacement and declined to speculate on when or if a search for a replacement would begin.

At the Guthrie, Puzo will be working with artistic director Garland Wright in a variety of capacities, including the supervision of artistic staff, new play commissions and the laboratory program.

“They’ve been talking to me for a long time,” Puzo said Wednesday, “since last April. It was a hard decision to make. I’ve lived in Southern California all my life and I have a wonderful position at the Taper. Ultimately, it was an opportunity to meet new challenges.”

Puzo, who has been at the Taper since 1970, said “I have the distinction of having had the most titles of anyone at the Taper. I started as a production assistant--a gofer. I had been a production stage manager in San Francisco and fell into a temporary job at the Taper. I stage-managed until about 1978.”

At that point, Puzo was assigned to work in a producing capacity with Gwen Arner, who was in charge of presenting Playworks, the Taper’s program of new plays for 1978. She segued the following year into supervising the Taper Lab, a position she held until 1983, when the Lab was restructured and renamed the Taper, Too, with Puzo in charge. She is also largely responsible for the development of the Taper’s literary cabaret at the Itchey Foot Ristorante in downtown Los Angeles (Sundays at the Itchey Foot).

As for her new duties, “Any job description is a kind of blueprint that has to be filled out when I get there,” she said. “I’m going to be doing the same sort of thing that I do here, but with new people and new artists, and in a very different cultural climate--classically-based. To say nothing of the real climate. I don’t know what happens when I meet the Midwest winter.”

Is there a financial advantage in the move? “A slight one,” she acknowledged, but that wasn’t the motivating factor.”

LOSE ONE: Playwright Marlane Meyer has asked to have her name removed from “Burning Bridges: What to Do When the Egg Won’t Stick,” a piece she was developing with playwright/director Reza Abdoh and which opens at the Los Angeles Theatre Center April 14.

Meyer’s request reportedly came because other commitments have kept her too far away from the project for too long, not over any artistic disagreement, according to a spokesperson for LATC. Meyer, who is in New York, could not be reached for comment.

WIN ONE: On the other hand, Meyer is the first prize victor in South Coast Repertory’s first annual California Playwrights Contest in Costa Mesa, winning with “The Geography of Luck.”

The $5,000 prize was announced Wednesday by SCR, which will stage the premiere of Meyer’s latest play as part of its California Play Festival this spring.

CalFest, as SCR has dubbed the month-long festival, also will mark the premieres of Robert Daseler’s “Dragon Lady,” the second-prize winner in the contest, and Beth Henley’s previously announced “Abundance,” along with staged readings of five unproduced plays by emerging California writers.

“The Geography of Luck” was described by SCR as a play about a former pop singer, now an ex-con, who hopes to change his luck by going to Las Vegas.

Daseler, 43, had apparently never written a play before. “Dragon Lady” is about a 16-year marriage that has reached a crossroads and deals with rootless people who cling to the familiar. Daseler is director of public relations for Claremont’s McKenna College. His second prize brought $3,000.

The third prize--$2,000--went to “Soiled Eyes of a Ghost” by Erin Cressida Wilson, who divides her time between Los Angeles and San Francisco. SCR has described her work as an unconventional “dreamplay” about the yearnings of an adolescent girl. It will receive a staged reading at the festival.