SCR Names Winners of Annual Playwright Competition : Stage: Top prize of $5,000 goes to Tania Myren-Zobel, an actress currently in a graduate writing program at UCLA.

Two playwrights who have written more than two dozen plays but neither of whom have ever had a major production are the winners of South Coast Repertory’s 1992 California Playwrights Competition.

The top prize of $5,000 went to Tania Myren-Zobel, 37, a professional actress who moved to Pasadena three years ago from New York and is currently in a graduate writing program at UCLA. Her winning play, “Capoeira,” centers on a woman caught up in an obsessive relationship with a bigamist. The second prize of $3,000 went to William C. Sterritt, 39, a self-described “free-lance administrative assistant” who moved to West Hollywood seven years ago from Boston to gain exposure for his stage scripts but still must support himself with part-time office work. His winning play, “Caribbean Romance,” dramatizes the freakish love affair between a possible serial killer and a woman who fantasizes about Fidel Castro.

Theater officials also named four runners-up in the competition, which drew more than 400 entries from around the state.

Myren-Zobel, reached at her home, said in a telephone interview that she was surprised by the award when she learned of it about 10 days ago. She was so busy preparing for a UCLA workshop production of the play, she said, “I’d almost forgotten I submitted it.”

Getting that kind of cash reminder “was a great Valentine’s present, let me tell you,” she added.

The title of her play “comes from a Brazilian form of martial arts, which looks in practice like happy slaves dancing their way to freedom,” the actress-turned-writer said. “I thought from my experience that was the perfect metaphor for women today.”

Though “Capoeira” is not directly autobiographical, it nonetheless is based on experiences she has had or heard about from others.

“I’ve been in relationships with men like the bigamist in the play, as I’m sure almost every woman has,” she said. “There’s the one guy you fall for who steps all over you, and you beg him to come back and do it again.

“Women are liable to be used and abused more than men because men are brought up to believe they’re the main event and women are the audience. Women are supposed to sit in the dark and applaud.”

She noted, moreover, that while the central figure of the play is an amalgam of many women, the bigamist was modeled on one of her husband’s uncles, now dead. Certain details of his character were taken from stories she overheard at his funeral.

“I guess nothing is safe around a writer,” she said. “The bigamist in the play is one of those golden boys who feels he was cheated of the American dream, and now everybody owes him a life.”

Myren-Zobel was born in Chapel Hill, N.C., but grew up mainly in Albany, N.Y., and Bloomington, Ind. She says she wrote seven unproduced plays before “Capoeira,” including two--”Plainsong: A Western” and “Waiting It Out” (about bikers)--that have received workshop productions at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York.

“I began to write in 1983 during a long period of unemployment,” she recalled. “As an actor you’re at the mercy of everyone else. Writing I could do without someone hiring me.”

Her acting career began to taper off during the late ‘80s after the birth of her son, she said. It had included roles in major regional theaters such as the Arena Stage in Washington, the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., and the Baltimore Center Stage, where she played Agnes in “Agnes of God.”

Her most recent role was Lavinia in “The Fair Penitent,” directed by Charles Marowitz, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1987.

“Acting doesn’t really satisfy me anymore,” she said. “It’s a small part of the pie.”

Sterritt, who was born in Camden, N.J., and grew up in Cape May on the Jersey shore, said in a telephone interview he was “overwhelmed” by his SCR prize.

“It’s the recognition more than the money,” he said. “I’ve spent years out here struggling. After going through the graduate playwriting program at Carnegie-Mellon University (in Pittsburgh), you want to be a professional. Playwrights I know in New York are ecstatic if they get a staged reading once in a blue moon. I came out here because I thought it would be more to my advantage. I thought the work would get done beyond that level. This is a good harbinger.”

Sterritt, who says he was inspired to become a playwright after going to the theater for the first time at the age of 23, is still waiting for a major production but he has had other harbingers of eventual success. Of the 18 plays he has written to date, “10 have been produced at some level or other,” he said.

“Magic Flowers,” a one-act, has been done most often, including productions at the Garden Grove Community Theatre four years ago and at Actors Alley in Los Angeles two years earlier. Another play, “Calliope Rose,” was also produced in Los Angeles at the Powerhouse Theatre.

But the play that has earned him the most attention until now, he said, is “Pumpin’ the Chihuahua,” which was staged in a 1991 summer festival of new works at the Long Beach Civic Light Opera. The script also won him a grant from the California Arts Council and was a finalist in last year’s SCR play competition.

Sterritt described “Caribbean Romance,” a black comedy set in a Key West motel, as “the love affair between a couple of freaks juxtaposed against the Cuban revolution.” It is an outgrowth of “Chihuahua,” he said, with which it shares a style that mixes the surreal and the real.

In the earlier play--described as “ ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ meets ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ “--a pair of Latin men kidnap a prize Chihuahua to pay for a sex-change operation for one of them (who is haunted by Maria Montez, a Latina screen star of the ‘40s).

Also receiving honorable mentions but no cash prizes in SCR’s fourth annual competition were “Lobby” (about a labor dispute at a New York co-op) by Tim Brandoff of North Hollywood; “Arthur and Leila” (about the conflicts of a Chinese family) by Cherylene Lee of San Francisco; “Mooncalf” (about a mentally handicapped man) by Leon Martell of Los Angeles; and “Blood on the North Pole” (about an insensitive journalist) by Michael Ventre of Manhattan Beach.

Myren-Zobel’s script will be given a workshop rehearsal and a public reading May 4 on the SCR Mainstage as part of her prize. Several of the runners-up will also be given staged readings, with dates and titles to be announced.

Two previous first-prize winners--Marlane Meyer’s “The Geography of Luck” (1989) and Mark W. Lee’s “Pirates” (1990)--eventually went on to full SCR productions. Last year’s winner--Abe Polsky’s “Custer’s Last Band”--has not.