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Emily Saliers, one half of the folk rock duo Indigo Girls, is making her musical theater debut with a new romantic comedy premiering at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope this season.

“Starstruck” is set in a fictional Idaho mountain town and inspired by “Cyrano de Bergerac” through the Steve Martin film “Roxanne.”  The production features Saliers’ original songs.

For Saliers, the project marks a deliberate move beyond the Indigo Girls catalog and into new creative territory at a time when, she says, making art feels both necessary and sustaining.

“It’s so wonderful to be creating art in the midst of all this very, very troublesome stuff that’s going on in this country,” she said. “I’m grateful to be making art in the midst of that, because otherwise you just feel like sometimes giving it all up.”

Saliers initially insisted on not using any songs from the Indigo Girls’ catalogue, preferring to create and contribute only new songs.

“I don’t like jukebox musicals,” Saliers said. “Don’t anybody use that word.”

Ultimately, she relented.

Of the 18 songs in “Starstruck,” less than a handful will be familiar to the fans of the Indigo Girls.

“The most gratifying for me was the new material,” she said. “I was concerned that people would be distracted by their relationship with the song that they’d lived with, that their own lives were attached to.”

The plot

“Starstruck” is loosely based on the play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” about a witty but unattractive man who feeds romantic lines to a better-looking suitor in efforts to woo his lady love.

But co-writer and star Beth Malone said her inspiration wasn’t the original French play from 1897, but its 1987 film adaptation, “Roxanne,” starring Steve Martin.

After her Tony-nominated lead in the Broadway musical “Fun Home,” about a young woman coming out in her family’s funeral home business, Malone said she was approached by producers to glean ideas for new musicals based on old movies. But the best characters — the ones who were flawed and funny — were male.

“I’m like, ‘I want to play Steve Martin in ‘Roxanne.’ That’s what I want to do,’” she said. “The curmudgeon, strong-willed, anti-hero, cranky-ass is played by me. It’s not a man.”

“Starstruck” is set in the fictitious Idaho mountain town Sawtooth, where Malone’s character, a park ranger and amateur astronomer named Cyd DeBerg, is trying to establish a Dark Sky Reserve, where lights are banned at night to allow for stargazing.

Idaho is home to America’s first designated Dark Sky Reserve, established in 2017, giving the musical real-world grounding.

“It’s one of the last dark skies, and our prickly-pear main character, who is complicated and has a lot of sharp edges, is on a mission to save that dark sky for all the right reasons,” said co-writer Mary Ann Stratton. “The environmental reasons, the human psychology reasons, the bird migration reasons. But also because she’s an isolationist. She has a heart she’s trying to protect. Being able to put a little dome over her reality to keep from having to risk her heart is the big metaphor of the dark sky.”

When an NPR podcaster named Roxanne shows up to report on the effort, a local man falls for her and asks Cyd to help him win her over.

Then the “Cyrano de Bergerac” tables — and genders — get turned.

“Cyd DeBerg is traumatized from an event from her youth and incapable of relating to other human beings that doesn’t involve some self-protection,” Saliers said. “As a songwriter, I’ve written a lot about that, what comes from our heart and what we’re afraid of.”

Saliers admits romantic comedy is new to her. With “Starstruck,”  she is stepping outside her natural creative space.

“I’m not that funny,” she said with a laugh. “There’s a couple of songs that are very lighthearted. If I really needed some funny zingers, Beth and Mary Ann would help me write those zingers.”

She is fascinated with the relationship between “the infinitesimal and the vastness that the human brain can’t even conceive of.”

“How human beings are endowed with this profound consciousness and also the ability to make terrible, hurtful decisions,” she said. “It’s unique to the human experience.”

Saliers hasn’t given up on the Indigo Girls. She and Amy Ray will tour the Philadelphia region later this summer.

“Starstruck” runs at the Bucks County Playhouse until March 21.