Coyote as Guiding Spirit : Jennifer Taub’s drama, set in northern New Mexico, is infused with a sense of the supernatural. She utilizes the Navajos’ crafty creature, which is a trickster and can transcend death.

Ask anyone who has been there and they’ll tell you about how the landscape stretches to the horizon, bordering the gigantic sky like a supernatural painting, and how the air is either impossibly clean or heavy with the power of an electrical storm.

Ask Jennifer Taub about northern New Mexico and she’ll tell you more.

This is, after all, the place where she was riding in a hot-air balloon in 1987 with a group of elderly women when the balloon suddenly descended far from its intended destination. When--as Taub explains it--you drop out of the sky, land in an uninhabited, wild place, and begin searching on foot for help. You become extremely aware of the landscape around you.

“We eventually found people and got back,” she says, “but while I was there, I was so struck with a sense of how large the place was, and how small I was. It made me sense my own mortality.”

Something was bubbling up inside her, she says, and it seemed to come out later that night: “I was back at my motel in Santa Fe and I did this totally crazy thing. An electrical storm was blowing through, and I just ran outside next to the pool, and looked at it, almost mesmerized.”

There are less risky ways to be inspired to write a play, but Taub’s way resulted in her first full-length work, “Coyote in the Blue Mountains,” playing at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks. It straddles the disparate worlds of a pent-up Los Angeles and a more spiritually potent Taos, N.M., the dual homes of Marty, an artist-victim of the nuclear age.

“She’s one of the ‘down-winders,’ ” Taub says, referring to victims of radiation exposure during the United States’ aboveground nuclear bomb tests of the 1950s. “Technically, her New Mexican family would have been unlikely to be affected by the tests, but her disease isn’t really the play’s center. It’s a play about hybrids: Her family is intermarried Pueblo and Navajo; David, the man she falls for, begins as a manipulative lawyer and ends up spiritually transformed; John and Fran, Marty’s friends, cross back and forth between love and hate.”

Perhaps the only character in Taub’s world who resists hybridization is Marty’s uncle, Tio, who exists above the fray, unswervingly faithful to the peyote-based religion that is still strong in the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. “Tio believes in the old gods,” says the playwright-producer-actor, in her late 20s, who also plays Marty in director Bruce Whitney’s staging. “He’s not very old, but old enough so that all of his friends are dead. That’s why he hangs out in graveyards all the time.”

Taub wrinkles her face at any mention of New Age spiritual thinking, which she takes pleasure in dismissing as “ersatz.” But, she says, she does believe, with the Navajo, in ghosts. And the guiding spirit behind her play is the coyote figure himself--that alternately clownish, bumbling and crafty creature that is ubiquitous in Native American literature. Coyote literally appears in “Blue Mountains,” but Taub’s strategy is to suggest coyote through David, who’s a little conniving, a little sexy and a little lost.

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“I’ve tried to conjure up the coyote figure of the Southwest, which is very different from California, where tribes depicted him as goofy. In the region of Arizona and New Mexico,” she says, “he’s both a trickster who can screw things up, and passes through death, transcending it. What I like about the Navajo view of dying is that their coyote figure can say, ‘Boo!’ to death.”

Indeed, the theme of death seems to have a life for Taub: Her play in progress is about the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration in Los Angeles. “You can see that I’m into it,” she says, pointing at a living room table filled with a collection of calaveras , those playful Day of the Dead figurines.

The production is the culmination of five years of workshops, readings and rewrites, some at Taub’s artistic home, the Pacific Resident Theatre Ensemble. Vince Melocchi, who portrays John, first glimpsed the script in fall of ‘93: “I’m a huge football fan, and I thought I’d scan it over during game breaks.

“But I got into it as I turned the pages, and I completely lost track of the game. I could also see Jennifer in it, especially Marty’s strong will. That’s Jennifer: intelligent, secure with who she is and what she wants in life.”

Where and When What: “Coyote in the Blue Mountains.”

Location: Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays.

Price: $12.

Call: (213) 660-8587.