Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Nikkole Salter examines inequities in public education in her powerful, thought-provoking, thoroughly engrossing Lines In The Dust, a memorable debut collaboration between Collaborative Artists Bloc and Support Black Theatre at the Matrix.

Salter’s 2014 play’s two 40ish African-American female protagonists have a meet cute worthy of a Tyler Perry romcom (minus the rom) when school administrator Dr. Beverly Long (Kelly Jenrette) and corporate attorney Denitra Morgan (Erica Tazel) find themselves home-hunting at the same open house in upscale Milburn, New Jersey, a mere ten miles from Newark though it might as well be a world away for those struggling to make ends meet in the state’s crime-infested largest city.

No wonder then that Beverly bhas recently quit her job with the Newark public school system in hopes of safer employment in the suburbs. No wonder too that Denitra is house hunting in Millburn now that her daughter Noelle is about to enter high school.

Whatever the circumstances of their first encounter, it’s clear that Beverly and Denitra have clicked. They have so much in common, after all.

Cut to a year and a half later and a meeting between Beverly, now interim principal of the very well-funded Millburn High School, and Mike DiMaggio (Tony Pacqualini), a 60something retired police officer-turned-private investigator hired by the school district to seek out and find students faking Milburn residence to obtain the kind of education impossible to attain in Newark public schools.

Using language Beverly immediately recognizes as coded — “There’s no wall keeping them over there and us over here. It’s just a line in the dust. And once that line gets crossed, once that outside element gets in … then we’ve got ourselves a problem.” — Mike promises to ferret out each and every (presumably black or Latino) student who’s attending Milburn High School illegally.

In the meantime, there’s Denitra’s surprise office visit for Beverly to attend to, an arrival prompted by an official school notification that Noelle has been suspended from Milburn for apparently not having turned in the paperwork required to confirm local residence.

Oh, and there’s also been a possibly gang-related school shooting for Beverly to deal with, one involving a student who’d been attending Millburn with falsified residency papers, one that’s gotten the interim principal sued for “negligent endangerment.”

All of this, however, is merely a preamble for a discovery Beverly makes about halfway through Lines In The Dust’s intermissionless 110 minutes, one which I won’t spoil here (even though the production’s publicity blurbs pretty much do just that) except to say that much of what we’ve been led to believe up until now has quite simply not been true.

Playwright Salter certainly gives an audience plenty to think about (and hash over with each other after the show), not the least of which is how to define what’s right and what’s wrong when the quality of a child’s education is at stake.

She’s also created two richly layered, fully developed black female characters each of whom could easily have found herself in the other’s shoes had circumstances been different, which is why having Jenrette and Tazel alternate in the roles makes brilliant sense.

The duo were certainly on fire on opening night under Desean K. Terry’s razor-sharp direction, with Jenrette’s dynamic star turn as Beverlyand Tazel’s equally stunning Denitra earning the powerhouse pair a much deserved standing ovation, and the always fabulous Pasqualini meriting his own round of applause for fully inhabiting blue-collar Mike’s racist, anti-Semitic, but perhaps not irredeemable skin.

The production looks and sounds terrific too, the Matrix’s “widescreen” stage allowing scenic designer Mark Mendelson to create two distinct playing locales further differentiated by Sean Cawelti’s scene-setting picture-frame projections and Derrick McDaniel’s striking lighting design, with Wendell C. Carmichael’s character-perfect costumes and Zoë Carr’s just right properties matched by Alexis Tongue’s drama-propelling sound design.

Lines In The Dust is produced by Billy Baker, Ariane Helou, Tarina Pouncy, Keiana Richàrd-Bartolome, and Natasha Ward. Ward is casting director. Pouncy understudies the role of Beverly.

Kamal Bolden is assistant director. Megan Prahl is dialect coach. Lindsay A. Jenkins is dramaturg. Rich Wong is production stage manager and Arielle Hightower is assistant stage manager. Casting is by Natasha Ward, CSA. Judith Borne is publicist.

I wish my calendar had room on it for me to see Kelly Jenrette and Erica Tazel switch roles, a rarity in LA theater. At the very least, I count myself lucky to have witnessed two actresses at the top of their craft in a play that I can’t stop thinking about. Jenrette and Tazel are that good. Lines In The Dust is that good.

Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Avenue Los Angeles.
https://LinesintheDust.eventbrite.com

–Steven Stanley
November 4, 2023
Photos: Matthew Law

Tags: Collaborative Artists Bloc, Los Angeles Theater Review, Matrix Theatre, Nikkole Salter, Support Black Theatre