“A Quality Start”
Toni
Stone (born Marcenia Lyle Stone in St. Paul, Minnesota; 1921-1996), the
first woman to play with men in organized baseball, played on a variety of
levels from the 1930s through the early 1950s. She pitched as a teenager but
her adult career was as an infielder. Regardless, Lydia R. Diamond’s fascinating
new eponymous play about a largely forgotten pioneer could well be described by the pitching term of “quality start.”
Wikipedia says a quality start is “a statistic for a starting
pitcher defined as a game in which the pitcher completes at
least six innings and permits no more than three earned runs.” Thus, Toni
Stone, based on Martha Ackerman’s book Curveball: The Remarkable Story
of Toni Stone, is neither a perfect game nor a grand slam but it’s a good enough
revelation of a pathbreaking athlete and her times to qualify as a quality start,
pitcher or no. (It also happens to be the second Toni Stone play, Roger Nieboer's Tomboy Toni having been produced at St. Paul's History Theater in 1996.)
The two-act play, which runs around two hours and ten
minutes, is overlong, like a game that goes into extra innings but, for most of
its duration, Pam McKinnon’s imaginative staging, supplemented by the incisive
choreography of Camille A. Brown, keeps the ball spinning and the actors
moving, with considerable baseball-like business: mimed ball-throwing and
catching, bat swinging (and accompanying sound effects), and so on. Baseball implements, like catcher's masks, are used for multiple purposes. Often, someone
playing an umpire adds emphasis by calling strikes.
It helps greatly that McKinnon
and Brown’s team of nine African-American players is of major league-level
acting ability, most of them playing a single position (“character,” I should
say), with occasional shifts to someone else (including white folks). 
When necessary to suggest another character, an actor will
usually hint at the change by donning a symbolic item of clothing, even to play
a woman; in one gender flipping portrayal, though, Kenn E. Head, playing Millie,
a female friend of Toni’s, does it in full drag, but seriously and not for
laughs. (The excellent costumes are by Dede Ayite.) April Matthis, playing Toni
in a memorable, award-level performance, is the only actual woman in the company. (She took over the role from Uzo Aduba last year when the latter left because of a scheduling conflict.)
Diamond’s approach is metatheatrical, as Toni Stone (1921-1996),
slides through her autobiographical tale, both narrating to us and interacting
with the other players in highlight moments from her story. With a couple of
exceptions, everyone continues wearing the baseball uniforms of the
Indianapolis Clowns, an important team in the Negro American League.
Stone, who’d been playing with semipro teams, including barnstorming
ones, joined the Clowns (replacing Hank Aaron, of all players!) when she was 32, in 1953. It was this job that broke the barrier
against mainstream, female pros, although she still had to deal with a lack of
respect for her abilities and too great an emphasis on her gender.
(Her accomplishment, by the way, isn't to be confused with that of the women who played for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded in 1948 exclusively for female players. It was the inspiration for the movie A League of Their Own.) 
The action takes place during the mid-20th-century years
when major league baseball was transitioning from all-white teams to the inclusion
of black players, beginning with Jackie Robinson, who is often mentioned in the
dialogue. This revolutionary situation, of course, signaled the imminent end of
the Negro Leagues and is likely responsible for allowing the door to open enough
so that a female player could slip in (there would be two more afterward).
The play’s baseball players appear to be a jumble of reality
and fiction. King
Tut (Phillip James Brannon) and Jimmy Wilkes, were actual people. The former is depicted as a capable player while the
real person of that name, a.k.a. “the clown prince of baseball,” is said to have
had only seven plate appearances in his career, his three decades in the game
being primarily as a comedian.
Spec Beebop [sic] (Daniel J. Bryant), another baseball funmaker,
who teamed up with Tut, was a nonplaying dwarf (his name spelled Bebop, not Beebop);
in Toni Stone he’s a short, overweight, bespectacled athlete with a
professorial bent, who jokes about his substantial male endowment. (Al Schact, of course, was the
“clown prince” of major league baseball.)
I’m unable to verify the existence of player-coach Woody Bush
(Ezra Knight), whose name doesn’t appear in this
alphabetical list of Negro League players, which is also the case with
Elzie Marshall (Jonathan Burke), the handsome guy whose ladies man-attitude
Toni sees through as a subterfuge for his homosexuality.
The core of Toni Stone concerns the obstacles put in
the way of a black female athlete who played as well as any male but who had to
go to great lengths to prove she could do so with them on the same field. She
had to battle sexist attitudes from owners and teammates, who often saw her
more as a publicity stunt than as a viable player. At the same time, like her male teammates, she also had to battle the period’s virulent racism, which the play doesn’t hesitate to
present.
Toni is smart, quick-witted, and resistant to guff, but good-natured
and confident, as prone to profanity as her teammates, and anything but a
victim. When needing to take refuge from slings and arrows, she retreats into a
recital of the statistics of the players—black and white—of the day and
shortly before, as references to the likes of Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth attest. For
some reason, however, no years are cited to clarify the statistics cited. The play
presents Toni as remarkably well-versed in baseball stats but stumped by typical
classroom mathematics. (It’s not mentioned but Toni’s two-year Negro Leagues career—including
a season with the Kansas City Monarchs—ended with a batting average of .243.)
Matthis’s performance delivers on every count, being both personable,
formidable, and funny. She’s emotionally and intellectually pointed that you
forgive her for lacking the physical stature of a professional ballplayer, or for
the slight hitch in her swing when she handles a bat.
Toni Stone delves into the biographical weeds of its
subject, introducing not only Toni Stone’s mother; her Irish Catholic priest; Syd
Pollock, the white owner of the Clowns; Millie, the prostitute who became her
close friend (Toni sometimes having had to sleep at brothels when nowhere else
was available in Jim Crow towns), and one-time star catcher and later baseball
mentor, Gabby Street. 
Of considerable importance is the four decades-older, San
Francisco-politician/saloon owner Auralious Alberga (Harry Blanks), who falls
in love with and marries her, but eventually has second thoughts about his wife
being a professional ballplayer.
Toni Stone is enacted on a set (designed by Riccardo
Hernandez) whose upper reaches are lined with large, stadium-style lights (effectively
used by designer Allen Lee Hughes), and whose acting area is a dirt-colored
wooden floor backed by low, bleacher type seats. Strangely, no green is present
in the scheme.
Whether or not Toni Stone wins any pennants, it comes
close enough to hitting it out of the park to make it an early season
contender.
Laura Pels Theatre/Roundabout Theatre
Company
111 W. 46th St., NYC
Through August 11
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