A native of the United Kingdom, Paul Webb has been fascinated with American culture since childhood. But it wasn’t until a six-month hitchhiking trip across America brought him to the Deep South that he truly got a sense of how complicated race relations in America could be. This, coupled with an interest in President Lyndon B. Johnson, drew him to the civil rights era, specifically the conflict between Martin Luther King Jr. and LBJ. Webb was intrigued by how the conflict manifested in the historic demonstrations in Selma, Alabama.
“What I came to realize was that the Selma voting rights campaign was the pinnacle of the careers for two extraordinary, although extraordinarily different, leaders,” Webb says.
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His experiences resulted in Hold On!, which will have its world premiere as the opener for The Black Rep’s 47th season this January. While Webb’s play is just now taking the stage, audiences may already be familiar with the Academy Award–nominated 2014 film Selma, inspired by Webb’s play.
Throughout his research, Webb was astonished by how dramatic Selma’s historical elements could be: the characters of King and Johnson, among other civil rights activists; the single-location setting (give or take a few trips to Washington, D.C.); the symbolic Edmund Pettus Bridge. He began turning his research into a play, which became Hold On!, thinking that it could more easily find a home on the stage. Over the course of many years and many drafts, it morphed into a screenplay.
“By the time I’d gotten my teeth into it as a screenplay, circumstances had changed a bit,” Webb says. “I met a producer who was very taken with the idea and was very supportive. So it was the screenplay that saw the light of day first.”
While Selma enjoyed wide acclaim when it was released nearly a decade ago, Webb continued to tinker with the play. His agent had a hunch that Ron Himes, founder and producing director of The Black Rep, would be interested in this story. He was right, and Webb could not be happier to see Hold On! premiere in St. Louis.
“It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say this is a dream come true,” Webb says. “I was absolutely thrilled that a leading Black theater was going to do this play, and I can’t wait to see it.”
Take Two
Paul Webb’s Hold On followed a nontraditional path to the stage.
While playwright Paul Webb was proud of how his screenplay for the film Selma tackled the story of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon B. Johnson on a much larger scale than it would have on stage, it also sparked ideas for how he could improve the original version of his play, Hold On! Webb says one of the principal differences between the screenplay and the play is deepening the portrayal of Coretta Scott King. “That’s one thing, among a few others, I can readdress, and it’s fantastic because you get a second chance to do things better,” Webb says. In addition to turning Coretta Scott King into a bigger role, Webb also feels he was able to better underscore MLK’s ability to rally a team of disparate civil rights leaders and activists who had an otherwise contentious, rivalrous relationship.
