‘Custer’s Last Band’ Wins SCR’s Play Competition

Two plays drawn from dark moments of 19th-Century American history have won South Coast Repertory’s third annual California Playwrights Competition.

First prize of $5,000 has gone to “Custer’s Last Band” by Abe Polsky, 50, a little-known, veteran playwright and screenwriter who describes his work as “high theatrical drama” about “what is right, ethical and honorable, and what isn’t” for a group of Army musicians hoping to survive on the eve of the battle at Little Big Horn in 1876.

Second prize of $3,000 has gone to “Noah Johnson Had a Whore” by Jon Bastian, 29, an emerging dramatist who calls his Civil War play “a very black comedy” involving a

purported widow seeking her deceased husband and a pair of dishonest undertakers who inflate their body count of soldiers because they get paid by the corpse.

SCR literary manager John Glore, who oversaw the 1991 competition, said Tuesday at a press conference to announce the winners that they had been selected from more than 300 unproduced play scripts submitted to the theater.

The decision to award the prizes to two history-based plays, which was made by SCR artistic directors David Emmes and Martin Benson, was “completely coincidental,” Glore said.

“I actually have a slight bias against historical plays,” he added, “because, more often than not, the writers think the material alone is enough. And so they come up with a dry pageant or a biography that has no vitality. But in this case, both these writers found fresh ways to use their material. They created really individual plays about contemporary issues.”

For Polsky, a Philadelphia native who grew up in Los Angeles, the award is the first major prize he has won in a 30-year writing career that has yielded three produced plays, several low-budget movies (including “Rebel Rousers,” which starred Jack Nicholson early in his career) and script credits on various TV series such as “Bonanza,” “Mission Impossible” and “Fame.”

“Custer’s Last Band” is Polsky’s second historical play with a survival theme. The first was “Devour the Snow,” a courtroom drama set in 1847 at Sutter’s Fort in the aftermath of the California-bound Donner party’s infamous mountain crossing, which resulted in death and cannibalism and accusations of slander among the survivors.

“Devour the Snow” had a 1978 premiere in Los Angeles at the American Theatre Arts, was produced in New York at the Off-Broadway Hudson Guild Theatre and went on to a production in London at the Bush Theatre. The Grove Shakespeare Festival also revived it at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove in 1987.

“I’ve written a dozen plays over the years, but that is the only one to achieve any real prominence,” said Polsky, who lives in Carpinteria with his wife, Merrily, and their 13-year-old son, Matthew. “That play still gets produced around the country.”

The short, stockily built writer noted in an interview that his other produced plays “never went anywhere” after being staged at small theaters in Los Angeles during the mid-1980s. The plays were “The Sweet Mack” and “Getting Rid of Mama.”

“I have tried to imbue ‘Custer’s Last Band’ with my sense of theatrical size and style,” Polsky said. “I know I’m not saying anything new when I say this, but a play has to hit you with the resonance of a dream. It has to tap emotions that you’re still pondering for days after you’ve seen it.”

In addition to writing for a living ever since his graduation from UCLA in 1962, Polsky said, he has taught writing workshops for stage, film and television “in one fashion or another” for the last 20 years--most notably as a onetime dramaturge for the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Waterford, Conn.

He said he was gratified by the prize not just because of the cash award it brings or the status it confers--”I have a strong ego that sustains me”--but because it might lead to an SCR production and an extended life for the play.

“Custer’s Last Band” was being scheduled for a staged reading at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego when he was notified of the prize, Polsky said. He canceled those plans, he said, because of SCR’s enthusiasm. A staged reading of the play is probable at SCR’s third annual California Play Festival in May, although that has yet to be announced.

The runner-up prize for “Noah Johnson Had a Whore” also represents a major boost to Bastian’s career. Only four days before he was notified of the award, he said in an interview, the Mark Taper Forum had rejected him for a writers’ workshop that he hoped would help him develop another of his play scripts, “Horse Latitude.”

“(SCR’s) phone call made up for that,” said Bastian, a Hollywood native who graduated from Loyola Marymount College in 1984 and lives in Los Angeles. “I wasn’t expecting it. I thought they were going to let people know much earlier than they did. So when I hadn’t heard anything, I thought, ‘OK, I didn’t win.’ ”

Bastian, who said he has written five unproduced full-length plays, is a member of the Golden West Playwrights at the Colony Theatre in Los Angeles. Two of his one-acts (“A Perfectly Natural Explanation” and “Where Credit Is Due”) have been produced at several small Los Angeles theaters.

He is also working on a play based on the real-life incident in which William S. Burroughs accidentally killed his wife 40 years ago in Mexico City while trying to shoot a highball glass off her head with a handgun. Burroughs himself has written about that so-called “William Tell act.”

Bastian acknowledges that he hasn’t met the famous author or had any contact with him and doesn’t know whether Burroughs would give permission to stage such a play.

Even so, the unmarried, athletic-looking playwright is prepared to take a chance--just as he did with “Noah Johnson Had a Whore.” He apparently didn’t have much more than an intuition about the Civil War when he began that black comedy.

“I wrote the first draft and then went back to research the period,” he said. “That’s when I found out a lot of what I had written was accurate. I have no idea where it came from or why. But it was all there.”

Though SCR officials consider it strictly coincidental that both winners of the 1991 competition happen to be history-based plays, scripts with strong historical platforms or reference points also have done well in the two previous competitions.

“Pirates,” which won first prize in 1990, revolved around a history professor obsessed by two 18th-Century female pirates who actually sailed the Caribbean. “The Ramp,” a runner-up in 1990, was a Holocaust play set in a surreal Nazi concentration camp. And “Once in Arden,” which placed among the finalists in the 1989 competition, took the 19th-Century actress Anna Modjeska for its subject.

In each of the previous competitions SCR customarily awarded three cash prizes totaling $10,000. This year’s reduction to two prizes totaling $8,000--not necessarily a permanent change--is designed to make wider use of limited financial resources, Emmes said.

He noted that the savings will help underwrite readings of other highly regarded plays submitted to the 1991 competition. These are expected to take place during the California Play Festival in May and are still to be announced.

SCR will economize further by producing one Second Stage production for CalFest this year instead of the customary two. The festival will add about $50,000 to SCR’s normal annual operating costs. American Express has provided a corporate grant of $25,000 for the festival; the rest must come from the theater’s operating budget.

CalFest will feature the premiere of Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s “El Dorado” on the SCR Mainstage. The Second Stage production will be announced.