MADRID – Get ready to draw your gun; the Wild West has come to Madrid-Waddington Central School.

The school’s drama club is busy rehearsing for its latest theatrical production, “Deadwood Dick, or The Game of Gold,” a western-style melodrama featuring black-hearted gamblers, damsels in distress, and “rootin-tootin” gunslingers.

“This show allows the students to step back into the 1890s and the days of the gold rush,” Director Trudy Ryan said.

The play takes place in Calamity Jane’s Mantrap Saloon, which is populated by a wide range of interesting characters, including Black’n Red, the villain and the two heroes that try to thwart him: Ned Harris and Wild Bill Hickock.

‘I am a very tragic character, who has been wronged by the law,” said Austin D. Scott, who plays Ned Harris.

Being a Western melodrama, there must also ladies in distress. Kathleen E. Tiernan said her character, Lily Blossom, is the complete opposite of her.

“Lily is known as a ‘prairie blossom,’” said Ms. Tiernan, a senior at Madrid-Waddington. “She’s blind, helpless, and very fragile. It’s fun to act that way because that’s not naturally who I am as a person.”

Sierra R. Dumas, who plays Rose Blossom, Lily’s sister and Ned Harris’s lover, said the stark differences in the characters and the heightened drama are what “makes the play come together.”

“Because it’s a melodrama, we try to act as dramatic as we can and we work off one another,” she said. “It gives us a sense of community, too.”

Ms. Tiernan agreed.

“There is a lot of talent here,” she said. “Our goal is to make it worth the audience’s while.”

Ms. Ryan said she her greatest joy as a director is to watch the students laugh at themselves and each other as they prepare for their characters.

“The ladies find preparing for the damsels in distress very different role than today,” she said. “While the gents are especially entertained by the action scenes with gun-slinging and saloon fights.”

The Madrid-Waddington Central School Drama Club will present “Deadwood Dick, or The Game of Gold,” in the school auditorium at 8 p.m. Nov. 23 and 24.

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