The Dramatic Triangle of Manuel Puig : Drama: Two-character psychological drama ‘Mystery of the Rose Bouquet’ receives its American premiere at the Mark Taper Forum tonight.

“It has taken a very long time to find the right casting,” Manuel Puig said in his lilting Spanish accent. “The producers wanted to do this almost two years ago. But now, I think it’s not the right casting.” The Argentine-born writer paused for effect. “It is the ideal casting.”

The playwright was referring to Jane Alexander and Anne Bancroft, the stars of his two-character psychological drama “Mystery of the Rose Bouquet,” opening tonight at the Mark Taper Forum. The story, set in an exclusive Argentine clinic, finds Alexander’s nurse ministering to a grieving grandmother (Bancroft), their individual secrets, memories and family connections unveiled in a series of flashbacks and fantasy sequences.

“I’m trying to develop something I’ve been doing in my fiction also--that is, to explore the triangle of character, audience and author,” said Puig, 57, who gained international acclaim with his novel-turned-play-turned-movie “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” “I think there is a particular tension between those three points. At some moments, the audience will know more about the characters than the characters themselves. So there will be a sort of complicity between the author and audience. That’s part of the novelty.

“In this case the old woman, played by Anne Bancroft, has very dark motivations that the character herself is not aware of. I’m trying to make the audience enter the secret realm of that internal mystery. There are reminiscences, memories that are forgotten--and I bring them back without permission. The character has made such an effort to forget those dark moments, that she has succeeded in blocking them out.

“On a blackboard, what do you do?” Puig (who in addition to his native Spanish also speaks Italian, French and English) searched for the right word. “Erase! Yes. This character has succeeded in erasing memories that are too painful. But I show those memories to the audience--that’s part of my exposition of the story.”

He chuckled. “Really, the play is very, very simple, very accessible, very easy to follow. The only trick is that these flashbacks that take place on the stage are only shown to the audience; the character is not aware of them.”

The writer, whose novels include “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” “Pubis Angelical” and “Heartbreak Tango,” is quick to differentiate between the use of dream sequences in “Spider Woman” and “Rose Bouquet.”

“In the case of ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ all of the films that are (described)--the stories, the fantasies--are told on the stage, told by one of the two convicts. In this case, the characters enact their own memories, play them. So it’s a totally different approach.”

Puig, who is just in from Rome (where he had been working on an English-language film script about 17th-Century composer Antonio Vivaldi) says some devices work better in certain mediums.

“At the beginning, I refused when people asked me to do the (stage) adaptation of ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman.’ I gave permission for somebody to stage it in Italy and do his own adaptation. But when I saw it on the stage, I ran home and did my own adaptation, ‘cause I saw the possibilities then. I thought I could do better, yes. But not all stories can go from one medium to another.”

Puig is hoping that Harold Prince’s upcoming musical version of “Spider Woman” will be able to make that transition. “It has very somber overtones,” said the author, who worked as an assistant film director till 1962 and was not involved in the screenplay of the 1985 movie. “I collaborated at the beginning, talking about my intentions with the novel. We had long meetings with him and John Kander and Fred Ebb (music and lyric writers), who wrote ‘Cabaret.’ ”

Educated in Buenos Aires and Rome, the writer is currently relocating from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Cuernevaca, Mexico, for his parents’ health. Puig agrees that a definite cultural vantage point informs his work, but believes that specificity should not be a barrier for American audiences.

“Sometimes, countries and continents share problems,” he said. “This play, for example, is about those women who couldn’t have the experience of the sexual revolution in the late 1960s because they were too old by then. They are bright enough to see and appreciate the changes of behavior, the new roles of women. But they don’t have the time to incorporate them into their own existence. So there is a certain bitterness, as they realize what they’ve sacrificed to cultural (convention).

“I remember well the late ‘40s-early ‘50s, what the conditions of women were. There were certain precepts that were taken as the law of nature, things that couldn’t be changed, not cultural impositions. For instance, I remember women--not stupid women, just average women--saying, ‘I cannot really care for a guy deeply unless I feel a little frightened when he embraces me.’ ”

He sighed. “It was taken as the holy truth that a woman couldn’t be sexually satisfied unless there was a certain domineering element in the man--that women had to feel frail to feel sexually OK. It was really unbelievable. I also remember when I was a child hearing people say--with a straight face--that a woman’s cortex was of lesser quality than a man’s, that physically she wasn’t an equal in brain terms.”

Growing up in Argentina in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Puig’s impressions weren’t limited to the social arena. In 1973, shortly after Juan Peron’s return to power, Puig left his homeland for good. “I had just published ‘The Buenos Aires Affair,’ and there were critical remarks in it about Peron’s first government, the repressive actions by police in the colleges. I wanted to share my experiences with the young people. But in 1973 that (kind of criticism) was considered sacrilege. One of Peron’s first actions was the banning of four novels and mine was one of them.”

Although the writer did not fear for his own safety, the political hostility was palpable.

“I was just starting to write ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ ” he said, “and I wanted to do that job in total quiet and isolation. You see, I feared, more than government censorship, my own censorship. When you fear for your family, you may produce some auto-censorship. So I left. But everything has black humor, you know. I was considered reactionary then for not wanting to accept Peron as a socialist leader. It was so clear he was a Fascist! And shortly after, of course, he showed that I was right.”