The author of this piece is a producer for The Kojo Nnamdi Show.

Leafing through a family photo album as a young girl, playwright Angelica Chéri made a startling discovery.

“Flipping through pages and pages of people who look like me … two white women!” she recalled on Monday’s episode of The Kojo Nnamdi Show.

Chéri is African American, and the two pale women were Martha and Mary Clarke, Chéri’s great-great aunts. And no, they weren’t white, Chéri’s grandmother explained to her at the time, but very light-skinned black women who passed as white in Texas in the era of Jim Crow.

Decades later, Chéri has resurrected the Clarke sisters in Gun & Powder, a musical that begins its world-premiere run on Tuesday at Signature Theatre. Its cast includes several Hamilton alumni and its director is Robert O’Hara, who most recently directed Broadway’s acclaimed and provocative Slave Play.

While critics lauded Slave Play, which depicts three interracial couples going through sex therapy by role-playing characters on an antebellum plantation, some argued that it might be too much for some theatergoers. “Raw,” “scalding” and ground-breaking were among the words used to describe it, and more than 6,000 people signed a petition to shut it down.

Gun & Powder may not challenge audiences quite so much, though it does delve deeply into issues of race, privilege, and poverty.

It’s a story about skin color, sisterhood and the Wild West—a “quilt of fact and fiction,” Chéri explained on Kojo Show. While the Clarke sisters really did grow up as sharecroppers in Texas in the decades after emancipation, and did pass as white, Chéri relied on her imagination for the central plot line of the musical: One sister falls in love with a black man and the other a white man.

The show emerged from an assignment Chéri, who grew up in Los Angeles, was given as a graduate student in musical theater at New York University. She wrote the script and the lyrics for Gun & Powder, and fellow student Ross Baum wrote the music.

Chéri and Baum won the prestigious Richard Rodgers Award for Gun & Powder in 2018. The year before, it was chosen from among 170 plays to be developed through the SigWorks Musical Theater Lab at the Signature Theatre.

Still, both were astonished that a director as celebrated as O’Hara’s would take on the project.

“Of course, his name was at the top of our list, but we thought it was such a long shot and there was no way Robert O’Hara is going to be interested in us. We’re two kids,” she said. “We’re an unknown.”

O’Hara, who also appeared on Kojo Show, said he saw something special in the project.

“There was a story that we don’t normally see told, and characters who were centralized that we don’t normally see in the center of a narrative,” he said. “And the music—it was glorious, and the lyrics were amazing.”

Gun & Powder’s songbook includes R&B, jazz, blues, folk, pop, and traditional show music. While Chéri said she had always wanted to put Gun & Powder in the hands of a black director, she also saw Baum, who is white, as the obvious choice to write the music.

They met at what she calls a “speed-dating session” between lyricists and music writers at NYU, where Ross enrolled after a stint singing on cruise ships.

“He is a performer and he understands the power of the voice and he knows how to write for the voice,” Chéri said.

Baum also understands the story of Martha and Mary because he’s Jewish, she added, noting the oppression both Jews and black people have suffered. Both cultures are searching for “our own spaces in our culture,” she said.

With such acclaimed leadership and a cast of Broadway vets, Gun & Powder could be positioned for a transition to Broadway. The show would have plenty of company from other D.C. expats who’ve headed to New York, including Dear Evan Hansen, Mean Girls, and Beetlejuice.

Signature has its own legacy of attracting national talent. It premiered Sheryl Crow and Barry Levinson’s movie-to-musical Diner, which they wrote in 2014. And Disney Theatrical Productions developed a version of Disney’s Freaky Friday—starring and written by Broadway talent—that premiered at Signature two years later.

Gun & Powder’s cast of 13 is led by Emmy Raver-Lampman and Solea Pfeiffer, who respectively play Martha and Mary Clarke, sisters who express differing levels of comfort passing in the white world. Raver-Lampman was in the ensemble in the original Broadway cast of Hamilton. She and Pfeiffer have played sisters before—Angelica and Eliza Schuyler respectively—in Hamilton’s West Coast production. Donald Webber Jr. is taking a leave of absence from Hamilton’s West Coast tour to play Elijah, Martha’s love interest, in Gun & Powder.

O’Hara draws parallels between the two shows. “They’re period pieces that have a modern sensibility,” the director said on Kojo Show, and there is a “placing at the core black bodies and brown bodies.”

Chéri said that even though the Clarke sisters were light-skinned black women in real life, she and Ross considered casting darker-skinned women for the leads during the development process. But O’Hara thought it critical that the actresses could actually pass as Martha and Mary did.

“The writer’s interest in having an African American director is my same interest in having someone who can pass, because they have a relationship to that that we don’t,” he said. “You can sense in their performance that this is a role that they can actually play themselves, as opposed to playing other people.”

Gun & Powder runs through Feb. 23 at Signature Theatre. Tickets $40-$103. Runtime approximately two hours and 15 minutes with one intermission.