JULIE JENSEN WARMS UP

It’s a long winter for American playwrights, as opposed to screenwriters or TV writers who earn big bucks turning out largely prefabricated stuff. And, symbolically, playwright Julie Jensen has taken a vacation, not in the Bahamas or Cancun but on a snowy waste in a motel overlooking Lake Michigan.

She discreetly indicated that she was with a friend, which warmed things up some. But another log on the fire has to be last week’s announcement that she’s won the CBS Dramatists Guild Foundation award for her play “Straight Odds,” to be produced at the Arena Stage in Washington.

Jensen, 43, also won a National Endowment for the Arts summer commission for a play about Butch Cassidy--all of which means that in the eyes of professional theater watchers, she’s someone to be nurtured. Her “Old Wives Tale” opens here Thursday at Theatre of NOTE.

“ ‘Old Wives’ is about a strange family that moves into the neighborhood of an old woman--I mean transients from Nevada in a big truck, with congenitally deformed children,” she said. “It’s a depiction of class conflict. You see things through her eyes. You’re supposed to understand her terror and the things she experiences, and come to the agreement that we should live and let live.”

Jensen got her Ph.D. in theater at Wayne State University and now teaches at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind. “I grew up in rural Utah, and I generally write on that theme. But I also write about women’s experience,” she said. “I think American culture is more aware of women’s experience, especially now that we have more women literary managers and artistic directors in regional theater. To be produced in American theater, it’s no longer necessary to be in a smart Lillian Hellman set in New York.”

Jensen considers “Old Wives Tale” a full-length, though short, play. Theater of NOTE has added Byrd Ehelman’s “The English Public House” to the bill.

Actor Justin Lord’s last major stage role in Los Angeles was as the policeman in the sensationally funny “Division Street” at the Mark Taper Forum. He also did “Vietnam Trilogy” at the American Legion site that has now been taken over by the intrigues of “Tamara.” Lord was a musician-composer in New York before he came west, and it’s those organizational skills he applies to Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller’s “Full Hookup,” opening Friday at the American Theatre Arts.

Lord said: “I played tenor sax, flute and keyboards in New York, and did fusion jazz-rock. I played on Archie Bell & the Drells’ ‘Tighten Up.’

“ ‘Full Hookup’ is about wife abuse, which is something I’m interested in from working with Sojourn, the organization that helps battered people. The play deals with the conscious and unconscious cruelty people inflict on each other--economically, socially, sexually. I see it as a black-and-white photograph, which the costume and set design follows. I see it as people trying to connect but not making it.”

Anyone who knows of “Smitty,” the elusive figure who runs the increasingly vigorous theater complex on Kenmore at Hollywood Boulevard, knows that his taste runs to theatrical energy and more than a passing interest in the gay experience. Smitty doesn’t speak for publication. Michael Kearns did, in regard to this month’s upcoming bill.

“No one is officially connected with Smitty,” Kearns said. “I happened to be in ‘T-Shirts,’ which established the Deja Vu as an Equity Waiver theater. I also did the original ‘International Stud,’ part of the Harvey Fierstein trilogy that later became famous. I’m directing Rebecca Ranson’s ‘Warren,’ an AIDS play that, unlike most plays of that kind, is suitable for the whole family in that it deals with medical facts and how to mourn. And at the 1709 I’m acting in Patrick Mulcahey’s ‘I Wish I Had Never Met You and Was Meeting You Now,’ which is written in light of AIDS consciousness and deals with our inability to relate.

“ ‘Theft of Innocence,’ Keith Molinsky’s play about child molestation, opens Friday at the Deja Vu, and Bill Oxendine-Santana’s ‘Accommodating Nona,’ which deals with Hollywood machinations, opens Saturday at the Fifth Estate. Smitty’s operation is unlike any other in town. If he trusts you, you have free rein. He’s an artist’s artist.”