History-Based Plays Winners at SCR : Stage: First prize goes to veteran Abe Polsky, second place to newcomer Jon Bastian.

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

First prize of $5,000 went to “Custer’s Last Band” by Abe Polsky, 50, a veteran playwright and screenwriter. He describes his piece 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 of the Little Big Horn in 1876.

Second prize of $3,000 went to “Noah Johnson Had a Whore” by Jon Bastian, 29, who calls his Civil War play “a very black comedy.” It involves a purported widow seeking her deceased husband and a pair of dishonest undertakers who inflate their body count of dead soldiers because they get paid by the corpse.

“Custer’s Last Band” is Polsky’s second historical play with a survival theme. The first was “Devour the Snow,” an 1847 courtroom drama in the aftermath of the California-bound Donner Party’s infamous mountain crossing, which had a 1978 premiere in Los Angeles and was subsequently produced in New York and London.

A staged reading of “Band” is probable at SCR’s third annual California Play Festival in May, but has yet to be announced.

The runner-up prize for “Noah Johnson Had a Whore” represents a major boost to Bastian’s career. Four days before he was notified of the award, he recalled, the Mark Taper Forum rejected him for a writers’ workshop that he hoped would help him develop another new play, “Horse Latitude.”

South Coast customarily has awarded three cash prizes totaling $10,000. The savings from a reduction to two prizes--not necessarily a permanent change--is designed to help underwrite readings of other highly regarded plays submitted to the 1991 competition.