When Foster Solomon was first constructing the plot of his film “Hawks Ridge,” he ran into a problem. He had already developed the character he was planning to play: Elijah, a preacher who has lost his faith because of a personal tragedy.

He imagined Elijah pitted in a moral and emotional battle against a nemesis, someone he initially thought would be a corrupt politician.

“The big thing that I wanted to do was make both of these guys very human,” Solomon recalls. “I was sitting there wrestling with the idea and finally realized that there was just no way I could figure out how to make a politician likable.”

Solomon eventually settled on making his adversary a mid-level drug dealer named Chill. “Since he’s a mid-level guy, the begrudging connection between these men is both of them feeling trapped by their chosen business,” he explains.

After years of development, fundraising and post-production, the film “Hawks Ridge” had its world premiere at the San Diego Black Film Festival in 2020, later debuting at the Richmond International Film Festival in 2021. But, from the start, Solomon was encouraged by colleagues in the local theater world to bring the story to the stage.

“I did a reading of the film’s screenplay at Firehouse Theatre and Joel Bassin [the artistic director at Firehouse at the time] was like, ‘why isn’t this a play?’” Solomon says.

After the movie premiered, that refrain was taken up by Kerrigan Sullivan, department chair for performing arts at Brightpoint Community College, where Solomon works as an associate professor. The stage adaptation of “Hawks Ridge” makes its premiere this month at Brightpoint as one of its professional-level Studio Series productions.

“I saw the film and really thought it would be a great adaptation for the stage,” says Sullivan. “There’s so much theatricality to the film and now, with the play, we have a very cinematic play.”

Since it was written for film, there are some key moments in the story that Solomon had to reimagine. One strategy he used to make those adjustments was a change of perspective to Elijah’s wife, Robin.

“The story is really the story of Elijah and Robin’s marriage,” Solomon explains. “But the film is very much Elijah’s story. The play is very much Robin’s story.”

“In the play, you discover she has started writing a diary to sort out her thoughts, a diary of a preacher’s wife,” he says. “Once I hit on that, it changed everything.”

One thing that has not changed from the film is the language. The dialogue includes frequent dropping of f-bombs and potentially jarring uses of the n-word.

“From a producing perspective, I just want to make sure everybody understands the nature of the play when they come to see it,” says Sullivan. “I think it’s really important for people to be able to engage in these stories in a way that maybe isn’t pretty.”

“When I was writing it, I was thinking that [the language] is part of what the story’s about,” says Solomon. “It’s the language of the real world that both of these men live in.”

In the film, the character of Chill is played by local actor, Alexander Sapp, and Solomon consulted with Sapp while filming. “Alexander was very much of the mind that, having grown up in the neighborhood he grew up in, this kind of language is not even something he thinks about,” says Solomon. “It’s just like punctuation [for Chill.]”

Though Solomon wrote, directed and starred in the film, he was only planning to work on the adaptation as the playwright. While Leslie Owens-Harrington will be directing, Solomon ended up being enlisted to portray Elijah. Sullivan thinks it’s the perfect outcome.

“I can’t imagine anyone else in the role,” says Sullivan. “He has such a deep connection to these characters.”

“Hawks Ridge” runs from Jan. 26 to Feb. 4 at the Lynn Theatre on the Midlothian campus of Brightpoint Community College, 800 Charter Colony Pkwy. Tickets and information at https://www.brightpoint.edu/academics/career-clusters/arts-communications/upcoming-performances/. The film, “Hawks Ridge,” can be seen on YouTube and Amazon Prime

Correction: An earlier version of this story contained the wrong grammatical spelling, it is “Hawks Ridge.”