Madeline Puccioni, Librettist
Madeline Puccioni is happy to be back at her real work, after grading English 1A papers for 30 years. Her first full-length play, Two O'Clock Feeding, was produced by The Magic Theatre in SF in 1980 and published in West Coast Plays IV. Raising a family and teaching college English full time left no time to write plays, but since retiring in 2014, she’s written over 40 short plays, and has had most of them produced, hither and thither, all over the world.
Her one-act, Playland Forever, won a spot in the William Inge Festival in 2018. Scene One of her Monticello 2020 won a spot in PlayHouse Creatures’ New Playwrights Festival, NYC, in January 2022. The Cassandra Murders was a semi-finalist in the Bay Area Playwright Festival competition in February. Piercings, a full-length collection of her “sad and hilarious little love stories,” was published by Next Stage Press in April. Her short play, Queen of Sorrows had a full production for Towne Street Theatre’s External Forces show at A Noise Within Theatre in Pasadena in May, and her one-act, The Saturday Nighters, had a full production for B3 Theatre in Scottsdale in June. Her 1913 was up and dancin’ for Spectral Sisters’ New Plays Festival in Alexandria, LA in July 2022. Three of her plays have been scheduled for theaters so far in 2023.
Like Dominique Morisseau, Madeline believes that “good writers see themselves in everybody.” She lives with her handsome Monroe in Oakland, California. She’s having fun.
Jeff Dunn, Composer
Jeff Dunn, composer and lyricist, first began to love the creation of musicals when Meredith Willson played a preview of his The Unsinkable Molly Brown on the piano at his childhood home. Earning a B.A. in Music at Grinnell College, where he received the Steiner Prize for musical composition, Jeff went on to a career in academia and project management while composing art songs, a film score (A Wilderness in Your Heart), and chamber works, many of which were performed as part of concerts for the National Association of Composers, USA, where he is a lifetime member.
Jeff has been a music critic in the San Francisco Bay area since 1993, writing for many journals including San Francisco Classical Voice, American Record Guide, and 21st Century Music. He is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America and the Dramatists Guild. His musical Castle Happy (with collaborator John Freed) received a festival run at the Altarena Playhouse in 2017. .
As a co-founder of EastBay PlayReaders, Jeff has composed considerable incidental music, including for The Tempest, and, for a PTSD program coordinated by the USS Hornet in Alameda, Sophocles' Ajax.