JB Tang Jackson and Dominique Gélin wrote humorous songs together as part of a sketch comedy group in San Francisco.

They’re now expanding their range, creating their own musical that they are developing at Live & In Color in Salem.

Live & In Color, which began in 2015 under the name the Bingham Camp Theatre Retreat, was founded by artistic director Devanand Janki. Janki is a New York-based director and choreographer who grew up spending summers at the Bingham Camp. The goal of Live & In Color is diversity and inclusion in all aspects of the theater industry.

The musical Tang Jackson and Gélin are writing — which will be given public readings this weekend — is “Howdyland!” In it, two writers of color — one is Black, one is Asian — are hired to develop a reboot of an old-school TV Western. They get sucked into the original show and interact with the characters — along with some “shufflers,” a sort of zombie. Live & In Color info describes the show as a “romp through the fabled frontier with a topsy-turvy QPOC lens.” (QPOC stands for queer people of color.)

How the idea was born

Gélin, who has a background in standup comedy and sketch writing, has performed at HBO’s Women in Comedy Festival and the All Jane Comedy Festival.

Tang Jackson, a writer and musician, has worked with the Shakespeare Theatre Company and The Smithsonian and has been commissioned by Berkeley Playhouse.

During the pandemic, Tang Jackson says, “I started processing some things in the world through music and shifting toward, ‘Oh, I want to tell stories through musical theater.’ It’s been something I wanted to do for a while. But as we started collaborating together, it started to take this larger form.”

Tang Jackson had done research about Chinese immigrants during the California Gold Rush and began thinking, too, about the lack of Asian cowboys in Westerns.

“That’s when I started to get into this thread of, ‘OK, I want to find some representation of that in the Western musical canon.’ I did a project that was a very sad song cycle (about Chinese miners in the Gold Rush).

“But we’re comedians — we can do something that makes people laugh. You know, comedy is medicine,” Tang Jackson says.

They delved into the question, Tang Jackson says, of “who gets to be a hero in the Wild West, and who is held up as a hero on these moral stages? I do think that the popularity of these Western shows were a teaching tool of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Shows like ‘Bonanza’ or ‘Gunsmoke’ and ‘The Rifleman,’ things like that did try to teach lessons, and it’s interesting the lessons they decided to try to push forward. You know, they tried. There were a lot of episodes about tolerance. But they were still using white folks to play indigenous characters, and they were still killing off women characters every episode.”

Gélin and Tang Jackson wanted to use the musical theater form to explore assumptions of what a hero is. What do viewers come to expect? Who gets to the play the servant and who gets to play the hero?

A love for country music

The music in “Howdyland!” is, within the show’s TV series world, country, while it’s more rock- and funk-driven during the contemporary scenes.

Gélin and Tang Jackson are both first-generation Americans who have an appreciation for country music.

“My love of country music was kind of a secret for a while, and Dom’s was not,” Tang Jackson said, adding that they bonded about their mutual music appreciation on a cross-country road trip.

Gélin says, “It took me a while for that not to feel like (my love of country music) was a secret. … There are (now) groups like The Carolina Chocolate Drops — ‘Hey, we are Black people reclaiming this music that our families created.’”

When Gélin’s father came to the U.S. from Haiti, he felt that listening to country music would help him assimilate, “completely forgetting, of course, that you still have a Haitian accent, you’re still a Black man living in America,” she says.

For a lot of immigrants, Gélin notes, Americana was an entry point to understand this new home country. As first-generation Americans, Gélin and Tang Jackson were listening to the same music as their parents but receiving it differently.

“When you appreciate the blues and jazz roots of it, the evolution of that music form, it just feels like I have every reason to take up as much space as I’d like in this area and not feel like, this is only something a certain kind of person gets to do,” Gélin says.

Joyful and funny

Janki says that theaters have been calling him to ask about musicals and plays Live & In Color had developed in the past that those theaters might now produce. The problem is, most of those works require a cast of seven of eight people, and those venues want shows with only two or three actors because of post-pandemic financial constraints.

Consequently, this year, Live & In Color looked for smaller shows to develop that are commercial and producible — a one- or two-hander for a play, and four characters or less for a musical. “Howdyland!” has four actors.

(Also chosen for this year’s Live & In Color was the play “Wetlands” by AriDy Nox, which was given a reading on Wednesday. It was presented through the June Bingham New Playwright Commission, which provides support to a new play by an early-career women/femme and/or non-binary storyteller.)

A lot of the 2022 submissions to Live & In Color focused on the pandemic and grief, which is understandable, but Janki says, because we’re still going through it, audiences might not necessarily want to watch that.

So the goal was to find works “that had something to say but was joyful and funny and a little bit of escapism,” Janki says.

“Howdyland!” fit the bill well.

Developing the work

Gélin and Tang Jackson say they approached Live & In Color with essentially an idea and some songs. They praise everyone involved with Live & In Color who has provided so much support and guidance, helping to develop the concepts that the duo had. The collaborative energy of this cast and crew is incredible, they say.

Janki and Dennis Corsi, who is Live & In Color’s director of new works and is directing “Howdyland!,” encouraged Gélin and Tang Jackson to include in “Howdyland!” what they had to say about being writers of color — what they and their colleagues face. Tang Jackson and Gélin were a bit hesitant at first but then dove in, adding the writer characters to the piece.

Shaping the tale through the lens of writing was important.

“Really, that is so much a part of why we do what we do — who tells the story, who’s allowed in the room at the table to tell these stories, who’s on the stage being the face of these stories?” Tang Jackson says. “By giving us access to these amazing resources, Live & In Color has helped put the pen in our hands and changed the story.”

IF YOU GO

What: The musical “Howdyland!”

Where: Bingham Camp, 490 East Haddam Road, Salem

When: 3 p.m. Sat. and 2 p.m. Sun.

Tickets: Free, but donations appreciated

Reservations: Recommended; the performance site is small

Visit: liveandincolor.org