Proto-Hyphenate

On her colorfully printed business card, singer-actress-writer Elizabeth Hansen introduces herself as a “screenwriter-crimefighter.”

And on her resume that’s well stocked with appearances on and off Broadway, in regional theater and national tours, she lists among her numerous special skills: fencing, shooting, motorcycling, karate and scuba diving.

Can she really do all those things?

“Yeah, that’s why I’m so much fun at parties,” she replies with a ready wit that punctuates her conversation. As for the crimefighter: “I put that in to show that I don’t take myself too seriously.”

The fact is, on the flip side of the 34-year-old auburn-haired performer is an emerging writer who’s quite serious indeed about her craft and career.

She recently earned a master’s degree in screenwriting from the American Film Institute, and one of her stage plays, “A String of Pearls,” is running weekends at the Gypsy Playhouse in Burbank. She describes “Pearls” as a “humorous and touching play” about five women on the home front during World War II.

She’s finished another play (a psychodrama about a multiple personality), she’s just picked up movie and TV writing assignments, and with Jill Andre, who directed “Pearls,” and Andre’s husband, Robert Sweitzer, she’s putting together the Pleiades Theatre Group, a nonprofit organization for writers and directors that would seek grants “with a vision to help develop really good playwrights and take a work through readings, rewrites, onto the stage and then make a movie out of it.”

Meanwhile, Hansen the singer-actress is performing in a Cole Porter tribute through January at Maldonado’s, the posh Pasadena restaurant.

In the perfect world, she says, “I’d be acting in musicals and also writing.”

And what about the crimefighter? “Well, I do keep a baseball bat at home, just in case.”