It looks like the O’Neill Playwrights Conference is close to nameing a successor to James Houghton, who left as artistic director last week. “Mr. Houghton left the O’Neill after discovering that its board had decided to centralize control to reduce costs without consulting him. In a telephone interview on Tuesday, he said he would have cooperated with the centralization and would never have changed the submissions policy if he had known about the board’s cost-cutting plans in advance.”