SCR’s Top Playwright Prize Goes to Nancy Crawford : Competition: The winning entry, ‘Mrs. Zelinski Comes to Call,’ is a dark comedy about a woman ‘who may or may not be Eva Braun.’

A former screenwriter who says she became disillusioned with Hollywood after getting two movies made there has won South Coast Repertory’s fifth annual California Playwrights Competition.

Nancy Crawford, 48, was awarded the $5,000 first prize for “Mrs. Zelinski Comes to Call.” She describes it as “a very black little comedy” about a woman living in a condominium “who may or may not be Eva Braun but who is very definitely death.”

Since winning the prize, announced here Saturday, Crawford has retitled the play “Kaminsky Comes to Call.”

“I like the way it sounds,” she explained.

The $3,000 second prize went to Cecilia Fannon, 42, a former television writer, for another comedy, “To Distraction.” It is about “a woman who jettisons everything in her life,” she said.

Neither writer has had any of her plays produced. But both said in separate interviews that they had come close to winning the SCR competition in previous years with other scripts.

Crawford, who was born and lives in Santa Barbara, said she began writing plays two years ago after careers as a screenwriter during the 1970s and as a fiction writer during the 1980s.

She turned to fiction because of “a traumatic experience all the way around” in Hollywood. Her screenwriting career culminated in 1978 when Universal-MCA released her adaptation of James Michener’s novel “Caravans.” Before that she had a motorcycle movie produced by Avco-Embassy.

“To this day,” she said, “I worry that James Michener is going to meet me on the street and punch me out royally for what was done to his book.”

Crawford said she has written two unpublished novels, “The American Colony” and “Iver’s Story.” They are now being circulated among New York publishers.

“Kaminsky Comes to Call” is Crawford’s third play. Her first effort, “Baader-Meinhoff,” was a finalist in the SCR competition in 1991. She said a rewritten version of that play, about the German terrorists Andreas Baader and Brigitte Meinhoff, also was a finalist in the 1992 competition by the National Playwrights Conference of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in New York.

Her second play, about the silent-film actress Clara Bow, is under consideration in the current O’Neill competition, she said.

Fannon, a native New Yorker who has lived in Newport Beach for eight years, said she has written five full-length plays and a dozen or so one-acts. During the mid-1980s for about a year and a half, she said, she was a head writer for the CBS daytime soap opera “Guiding Light.”

Fannon, who also writes short stories and fiction for children and free-lances as a technical writer, said she had submitted scripts to the SCR competition in 1990 and 1991. She said SCR told her she “came close to winning” both times. Those entries--”Wowee Maui” and “Learning to Float”--also were comedies, the former “about a dysfunctional family that goes to Hawaii” and the latter about “two women who have a 20-year conversation that keeps getting interrupted by men.”

The SCR prize for “To Distraction” was not the first time it has received recognition. Fannon said it won a $150 prize in November, 1992, from an L.A. Theatre Works radio series called “The Play’s the Thing.” As part of that award, which she has yet to collect, “To Distraction” will be broadcast March 31 and April 1 on KCRW in an L.A. Theatre Works reading.

Fannon’s comedy also will get a public reading March 15 at SCR. “Kaminsky Comes to Call” will receive an SCR reading May 3, launching a week of readings for several runners-up in the competition.

SCR literary manager John Glore said that five of the seven finalists were women and that five honorable mentions were also honored from among the 290 submissions: “The Broken Hearts Club” by Krandall Kraus; “Even Among These Rocks” by Claire Chafee; “Mad Love” by Jennifer Maisel; “The Watertown Primary” by Jim Macak, and “The Distance of You” by Adelaide Mackenzie.

Though honorable mentions do not win money, they are still eligible for full productions.

To date, the SCR has produced six plays from the competition and given out $44,000 in prize money, put up by the American Express Co., a corporate sponsor.

Previous SCR Winners

1988: “The Geography of Luck” by Marlane Meyer ($5,000), produced on the SCR Second Stage in May, 1989.

“Dragon Lady” by Robert Daseler ($3,000), produced on the SCR Second Stage in May, 1989.

“Soiled Eyes of a Ghost” by Erin Cressida Wilson ($2,000), not produced.

1989: “Pirates” by Mark Lee ($5,000), produced on the SCR Mainstage in January, 1991.

“The Ramp” by Shem Bitterman ($2,500), produced on the SCR Second Stage in May, 1990.

“An Office Romance” by Robert Daseler ($2,500), produced as “Alekhine’s Defense” on the SCR Second Stage in November, 1990.

1990: “Custer’s Last Band” by Abe Polsky ($5,000), not produced.

“Noah Johnson Had a Whore” by Jon Bastian ($3,000), produced on the SCR Second Stage in January, 1992.

1991: “Capoeira” by Tanya Myren-Zobel ($5,000), not produced.

“Caribbean Romance” by William C. Sterritt ($3,000), not produced.