“How do we, in an overwhelming, arresting, and gorgeously beautiful way, illuminate all that the book is?” Ms. Forbes said.

Back in 2015, as soon as Ms. Forbes finished the book, she knew she wanted to turn it into a stage production. The only thing in her way was Mr. Coates himself. “My recollection is I didn’t want to do it,” he said in a phone interview. “When ‘Between the World and Me’ came out, a lot of people had ideas for things, and I was just really tired and kind of suspicious.”

It was his longstanding friendship with Ms. Forbes that softened his stance and led him to award her the stage rights. They met in 1994, when Ms. Forbes was a freshman at Howard University and Mr. Coates was a sophomore; they helped organize a hip-hop and poetry cypher on campus that year and remained close ever since. “Knowing Kam, there’s nobody else I would have trusted to do it,” Mr. Coates said.

But rather than providing input, Mr. Coates decided to remove himself from the process entirely and give Ms. Forbes full artistic control. When Ms. Forbes tried showing Mr. Coates some of the more aggressive edits, he declined to look at all. “Kam has the freedom to pursue her truth. She don’t need me breathing down her neck,” he said, adding jokingly: “I’ll give you my review next week. We’ll see if this friendship is still a thing.”