Writers/composers Marcus Perkins Bejarano and Kim Jinhyoung have been working with a game company on a character who is a zombie.

“So from beginning of this year, we have really been mulling on what it means to be a zombie, what it means to be a human. And what makes a human not a zombie,” Jinhyoung said.

The duo is diving deeper into that idea in a format that seems an unlikely match with zombies: a musical.

The show is “ZOMBIES, INC.,” and it will be developed and given staged readings this weekend at Live & In Color in Salem. Live & In Color, created a decade ago by artistic director Devanand Janki, helps to develop new and inclusive theater, with the goal of giving voice to underrepresented communities.

The “ZOMBIES, INC.” production in Salem is directed by Janki. It stars Ryo Kamibayashi and features music direction by Andrew Wheeler.

The “ZOMBIES, INC.” storyline is this: During a zombie outbreak, a beleaguered businessman hunkers down in the jewelry store where he works in the iconic 30 Rock skyscraper. He begins to realize that he’s really been existing in “survival mode” not just now but during his whole life. So he decides to truly live.

“This whole show is about a guy who has been really obsessed with his career and who has been really consumed by this perfect family, perfect life, perfect career success,” Jinhyoung said. “We wanted to have him get isolated in a zombie apoc-

alypse and have him realize he actually was the zombie himself, because he was not being the 360, holistic person that he can be. Instead, he was very single-target minded, just like the zombies.”

That might sound serious, but the duo are comedy writers, so the piece percolates with humor.

“Everything we’re writing is a little exaggerated, a little bit heightened. But we still believe that this story resonates with everyone because I feel like me scrolling on TikTok for three hours in a row is not how I should be living,” Jinhyoung said with a laugh about people being zombie-like for periods of time.

He said that, in this musical, they tried to devise an example of “how to survive a zombie apocalypse — aka, de-zombify yourself.”

Much of the music is upbeat and has a Broadway pop feel. The duo give credit to each other for contributions to the songwriting. Ultimately, the result is catchy, fun music powered by clever lyrics.

A one-man show

While a swarm of zombies loom in the show, the cast consists of just one actor.

“That’s a challenge we wanted to create for ourselves,” Bejarano said. “There are other characters that will be captured by a voiceover or a prerecorded voice, that type of thing. One of the things we’re really interested by whenever we’re either watching or writing a show — it’s not about the character but about the character’s relationship with other people and how do those evolve over the course of the show?

“This show is no different, but it’s a challenge because it’s one person. Our hope is that people really get a sense for this character, how he interacts with the world around him and how the different relationships that he has in his own world collide as we get toward the end of the show. And (those relationships) kind of still help him in his realization that he hasn’t been fully alive and he’s been living like a zombie.”

As for why the character works in a shop at 30 Rock, Bejarano used to be employed at 30 Rock himself, in his pre-musical-theater career — as an attorney. (He earned degrees from Princeton University and Stanford Law School.)

Bejarano worked part-time at a law firm housed in 30 Rock. While he was toiling there, he had a realization. He loved the people he worked with, and while the work wasn’t always exciting, he knew that there were always other intriguing things going on in the same structure.

“This is where ‘SNL’ is, where Jimmy Fallon is. There’s so much interesting stuff happening in that building. People are accountants, and people are also writing jokes for Jimmy Fallon’s monologue that night. There’s something that’s really cool about that,” Bejarano said. “We wanted to be able to pull on that fun energy of 30 Rock, even if this person (the character in ‘ZOMBIES, INC.’) was stuck in one location.”

And they wanted a place that “screamed New York,” as Bejarano said, and 30 Rock certainly fits the bill.

A team is born

Jinhyoung, who now lives in Brooklyn, grew up in South Korea. He first wrote a musical comedy, unexpectedly enough, when he was in the military there. (Every male in South Korea has to serve in the military.) During Jinhyoung’s service, the colonel of his camp hosted a talent show to boost morale. The officer who was in charge of Jinhyoung’s battalion was very ambitious and wanted to get noticed by the colonel. So when the talent show came up, he assigned Jinhyoung to write a musical, since Jinyhoung had previously talked about wondering what it would be like to write a musical. The show he created was about friendship and finding camaraderie in the military.

That experience inspired the musical comedy “Two Nights & Three Days” that Jinhyoung and Bejarano — a Bolivian-American who is from Dallas, Texas — co-wrote later. The show was selected for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Music Theater Conference in 2020. During that pandemic year, the shows were developed virtually.

“To get selected by the O’Neill was such an honor. Working with them was amazing,” Bejarano said.

Jinhyoung and Bejarano met when they were both part of the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, from which they graduated five years ago. They were paired for the first time to work on a piece about a serious topic: hazing in fraternities. As they collaborated on the project, they were taking a serious approach.

“Then at one point, I started playing some very cliche musical theater comedy kind of tune,” Jinhyoung said. “Marcus was previously very bored with what we were coming up with, and he was like, ‘Oh, what is that?’ We were starting to goof around, and we were thinking (about) how can we turn this serious topic on its head and still (have some social commentary)? If we were to make a comedy out of it, how can we do it? That really excited us, and we found our voice as a team.”

‘What they’re doing is special’

Bejarano and Jinhyoung’s other collaborations include “WAIT … ING,” which was an O’Neill Center Music Theater Conference semifinalist in 2022, and “Side-Hustle,” which was chosen for the 2024 Johnny Mercer Foundation Writers Grove at Goodspeed Musicals.

Bejarano said they want “to emphasize how thankful we are to Live & In Color for this opportunity, how special an organization they are and how supportive they have been of us as artists and to artists of color in general. What they’re doing is very special. We really appreciate that and appreciate the community’s support of Live & In Color.”

If you go

What: “ZOMBIES, INC.”

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

Where: Bingham Camp, 490 East Haddam Road, Salem

Cost: Free, donations accepted

Seating: Very limited, so reserve a ticket in advance

For tickets: liveandincolor.org