Toni Stone was the first woman to play big-league professional baseball. She succeeded Hank Aaron playing second base for the otherwise all-male Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League in 1953. But while Aaron had been able to join the Braves because Jackie Robinson had broken Major League Baseball’s color barrier, MLB’s gender barrier remains in place to this day. That’s enough to make most anybody, not only baseball fans, curious about this woman’s life.
More production photos at NewYorkTheater.me
Toni Stone, a play by Lydia R. Diamond (Stick Fly, Smart People), satisfies much of that curiosity, and April Mathis does a fine job of impersonating Stone’s singular, awkward, charming character. There are funny scenes and pointed scenes — scenes that touch on the racism and sexism of the era. Yet, Toni Stone only occasionally sparks the kind of theatrical electricity that makes a play — not just the historical figure at its center — come to life.
Commissioned by the play’s director Pam MacKinnon and its producer Samantha Barrie, Toni Stone is based on Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, a 2010 biography by Martha Ackman, who is said to have turned detective to unearth the sparse information available about a woman who died in 1996 at the age of 75.
In the play, Toni is our narrator, testifying in an opening monologue to her love of baseball – or, more precisely, telling us about her love of the weight and feel of a baseball in her hand. Then she introduces us one by one to her teammates. Over the course of the two hour play, these eight male actors double as everybody else in her life, helping her to present her life to us in a patchwork of episodes. (It takes some adjustment when an actor is portraying a woman or a white person.)
We learn that Tomboy Stone, as she was called, was athletic from an early age — track team, figure skating…sports that her mother felt more proper for a girl. But Toni was obsessed with baseball. A local priest in St. Paul Minnesota, where the family had moved from West Virginia when she was 10, asked her mother to allow her to play on the parish’s baseball team. We see a series of comical scenes of Toni listening in on lectures that catcher and coach Gabby Street gave to the boys in the baseball club he ran. He keeps on chasing her away; she keeps on returning to listen. She finally wins him over with her persistence, her love of the game, and her skill (not the first time nor the last). He gave her “my first real glove” – which she cherished even years later when she discovered that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
We learn that the white owner of the Clowns hires her as a kind of a special attraction to up attendance and, despite her skills, convinces the other (white) owners in the league to give her deliberately easy pitches. She doesn’t want that, but he won’t hire her otherwise. She deliberately doesn’t swing at them.
We track Toni’s unusual friendship with Millie (Kenn E. Head), a prostitute who would put her up in her place of business because there was nowhere else for the lone female player to stay; and her unusual courtship with Alberga (Harvy Blanks) a man 35 years her elder. Just friends for a long time, she is reluctant even to kiss him. “Just make like you the bat and I’m a ball comin’ at it slow,” Alberga tells her. And it works – she leans in, as she does at bat.
But the majority of the time is spent with her teammates.
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We see them play an “exhibition game” with a white team, in which the Clowns were supposed to lose – but the racist taunts of the other team’s fans provoke team leader Stretch (Eric Berryman) into deciding they should play for real, after which they rush to the bus to avoid getting attacked by a white mob.
We see how the Clowns get their name when they are forced to clown around in a minstrel-like explosion of movement that has nothing to do with their sport.
Well-choreographed by Camille A. Brown, the episode is meant to be humiliating – which we know for certain because it’s followed by Toni explaining, in effect, that white people need to laugh at them as a way to mask their envy of the prowess that black athletes (and entertainers) exhibit.
It’s telling that the audience applauded more enthusiastically for this minstrel-like display than for anything else in the show. What this reaction spoke to, I suspect, is a hunger for more theatrical excitement.
There are certainly other scenes, (as you can see in the photographs) that show off Brown’s choreography to good effect. But these are relatively few. The storytelling technique of mixing narration with enactment is a practical solution, but one that can keep us at a distance. Too many of the scenes feel almost dutiful, as if the playwright, who has told interviewers she knew little about baseball before accepting the commission, was trying to prove she had done her homework.
There are baseball statistics up the wazoo. We learn, in the teams’ numbers-laden explanation of the game of baseball, that each side of home plate is twelve inches long, and that the bases form a 90-foot diamond. Toni constantly cites individual players’ stats, which is obviously meant to show her off-beat, obsessive personality, but a little of this goes a long way (e.g. “Smoky Joe Williams, nickname: Cyclone. 1286 innings pitched, 89 wins, 55 losses, 3.79 ERA, 111 complete games, gave up 303 walks, struck out 769.”) There’s a great deal of small talk among Toni’s teammates, a surprising percentage of which can be catalogued as (PG rated) locker room humor.
Some of this is funny. All of it is well acted. Most of it can be justified as having something to do with the subject. But my reaction to Toni Stone is a bit like your reaction to baseball if you’re a fan. No matter how much you enjoy the game, and how much you respect the players no matter what, you’re always hoping for a hit.
Toni Stone is on stage at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre (111 W 46th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, New York, NY 10036) through August 11, 2019. Tickets and details
Toni Stone . Written by Lydia R. Diamond, directed by Pam MacKinnon . Featuring Eric Berryman (Stretch), Harvy Blanks (Alberga), Phillip James Brannon (King Tut), Daniel J. Bryant(Spec), Jonathan Burke (Elzie), Toney Goins (Jimmy), Kenn E. Head (Millie), Ezra Knight (Woody) and April Matthis (Toni Stone). Choreographed by Camille A. Brown, sets by Riccardo Hernandez, lights by Allen Lee Hughes, costumes by Dede Ayite. Original music and sound design by Daniel Baker & Aaron Meicht. Produced by Roundabout Theatre. Reviewed by Jonathan Mandell.
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