Woman: [ Singing ] We got a story to tell you.

Man: [ Singing ] It's been passed down throughout the years.

Woman #2: [ Singing ] We gon' tell it like we heard from our kinfolk point of view.

But you know how family stories do.

Woman #3: [ Singing ] So we believe it's mostly true.

Man #2: [ Singing ] It starts with two... Narrator: A story long told in playwright Angelica Chéri's family is brought to the stage in "Gun & Powder," a new musical at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn.

Chéri: My grandmother is the niece of Mary and Martha Clarke, and she would show me photo albums filled with my relatives, African-American people, and it was always striking because in the middle of that photo album, we would see two white women.

These are actually my great-great aunts, and she would explain that they passed for white.

And they were outlaws.

And there was always some different spin on the story that she would explain as to, they robbed a bank, or they jumped a train, or they killed this person.

It was never the same story.

And no matter who else I would speak to, whether it was an uncle, an aunt, a cousin, everyone had a different perspective about what these women committed as their notorious outlaw escapades.

And so I thought that was just so fun and rich and musically potent.

Walker-Webb: Angelica Chéri, my book writer and lyricist, while she's giving us her family folklore, she's put it in the truth of its historical context so that we can all look back at this moment in American history and see just how fierce and powerful the people who survived that time period were.

Man #3: [ Singing ] In the barbershop, in the brothel house, in the Baptist church, barely steering clear of jail.

Renée: Throw it in the bag!

Narrator: In the Wild West, women outlaws and gunslingers were rare but not unheard of.

For Black women outlaws like the Clarke sisters, a society prejudiced against gender and race made their story even more exceptional.

Chéri: This is something that has been a part of not just American culture because of the stratification of race and colorism, but also around the world and what it means to have to suppress a part of yourself in order to survive.

Renée: [ Singing ] Oh, sleeping on these stiff straw beds.

Narrator: Mary and Martha Clarke, the sisters at the center of the story and Angelica's great aunts, are played by Liisi LaFontaine and Ciara Reneée.

Renée: I can just tell in the way that she writes how much care she has for this story, how important it is to her.

Walker-Webb: What Angelica has done is she's taken this story, where it would normally be two men at the center, she's made two women.

She's placed them at the center of the story.

So you get all of the capers and all the action and all of the story of a Western, but it's following two Black women.

She's kind of created a new genre.

It's kind of like, you know, you got the spaghetti Western.

I feel like she's creating, like, a soul-food Western.

You know, it's, like, really, really incredible.

Renée and LaFontaine: [ Singing ] ...all along.

We could stay here waiting for a change to come, pray to God the world will change its mind.

Chéri: We learn that they are living on a plantation.

They are no longer enslaved.

However, they are living in the Reconstruction period, picking cotton in order to pay rent.

And so we learn that their mother has a share-cropping debt, and she's in danger of losing her home.

Walker-Webb: The two daughters, they are very fair-skinned.

They're half-Black, half white.

And they get this crazy notion that they should pass for white and see if they can go find work that would be more lucrative for them.

So to place it in 1893, on their journey, they discover that they're in the West.

They're in the Wild, Wild West and people are gunslingers, and people are like, you know, doing whatever they can to survive, and they're like, "Well, maybe we should do that, too."

[ Laughs ] And so it becomes a little bit of, like, a "take from the rich and give to the poor" story, a little bit of "Robin Hood."

Chéri: When they stumble upon robbing people and becoming outlaws, it was something that was born out of a moment of survival, but then it becomes their new way forward.

Bayardelle: [ Singing ] And beware, my darlings, there's no secrets in the sun.

You won't have no... Walker-Webb: Martha is the sister who kind of wants to, like, save everybody, and Mary is the sister who desperately wants to save herself and is willing to do anything to do that.

And then, over the course of the play, these two women discover that you need a little bit of both.

Chéri: Thinking about it in the context of the American Western is very, very new in terms of our consciousness.

So it's exciting to mine this territory.

Walker-Webb: There's something about the American Western that just captures, like, what it means to be American.

You know, you see these characters on the frontier fighting to survive.

And because it's so dangerous, the love is richer, the heartbreak is richer, right, just because of the stakes of their environment.

Renée: [ Singing ] I am a woman I never, ever thought I'd be.

[ Sings indistinctly ] Chéri: The romance is extremely dangerous for two women who are passing for white.

When one falls in love with a white man, that has a different connotation than the other who falls in love with a Black man.

The romance ratchets everything up to the next level.

LaFontaine: [ Singing ] I gave my word.

I can't change course to wander and roam.

Bayardelle: What I love about this musical is that we're dealing with an issue that America has been dealing with for a very long time, which is race.

We're dealing with two girls who are both Black and white.

You're gonna go on their journey and what it feels like to be one person, but in two worlds.

So I think that's a story that a lot of Americans can sit with.

Renée: We get set up in the gravity of this situation.

And then we also get to see the resilience and the excellence and the comedy and the beauty of enslaved people, of Black people, of us, these women who are empowering themselves.

Chéri: Paper Mill has such a legacy of raising big new shows, so I'm really excited to bring this in such a heightened way to the conversation.

Cast: [ Singing ] Oh, oh.

Renée: [ Singing ] Ohhhhhhhhhhh-oh-ohhhh-oh-oh-oh!

[ Cast sings indistinctly ]