There are a lot of wonderful theater plays about baseball: “Take Me Out,” “The Year Boston Won the Pennant,” “Cobb,” the musical “Damn Yankees,” and don’t forget that August Wilson’s “Fences” has a lot of baseball memories in it. “Toni Stone” is more than fit enough to join that team.
Lydia R. Diamond’s biographical drama, which had an off-Broadway run in 2019 and has now been embraced by regional theaters around the country, is having its Connecticut premiere at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford through June 16.
“Toni Stone” takes the real life story of a woman that the subtitle of “Curveball,” the book by Martha Ackmann on which the play is based, declares was “the first woman to play professional baseball in the Negro League.”
Stone was not the first woman to ever play professional baseball, but she played at a particularly interesting time that seems ready-made for a live stage treatment. She was signed to the otherwise all-male Indianapolis Clowns at a time when that decades-old team was trying to increase attendance with a lot of show business stunts like choreographed dance routines
The play can therefore break into song and dance without it being a fantasy, then turn around and make the routines emblematic of how poorly the team was treated, derided as cheap entertainers when they were in fact skilled athletes. Stone has to fight for respect, insisting that she be treated as a true ballplayer and not have to suffer the indignity of being given soft pitches or wearing a differently styled uniform.
The cast of “Toni Stone” is a nine-person team like the Clowns, there’s one just one woman amid eight men. Constance Sadie Thompson plays Stone in a friendly fashion, with a big heart yet with eyes wide open to all the injustices that face her as a Black woman. One of the play’s most brilliant moves is to have the entire supporting cast be Black male actors, who play specific teammates but also Stone’s mother, her closest female friend Millie, a prostitute, the Clown’s insufferably superior-acting white owner Syd Pollock and numerous foul-mouthed overtly racist and sexist baseball fans who scream horrible things at Stone while she is playing.
The play darts between long monologues by Stone about what was going through her mind during major transitions in her life and intimate dialogues with Millie (a beautifully modulated performance by Brandon Alvión), her husband Aurelious Alberga (a man 40 years older than her, an age difference convincingly portrayed by James Edward Becton III), her teammates and others.
The scenes don’t always flow well into each other, which is honestly more of a staging problem here than a literary one. There’s a big bag of tricks theaters can dip into for scripts that play fast and loose with time and space, from subtle lighting or sound cues to projections that remind you what year it is or what place we’re in. Director Jamil A.C. Mangan and the designers don’t avail themselves of such helpful reminders, but they do take care to make each scene work on its own terms, building a mosaic of emotional moments that are much greater than any linear plot. Yes, it can get confusing, but that stops mattering after a while.
There are needs to fulfill that don’t involve continuity and chronological. Diamond dramatizes every struggle that faced a woman trying to forge a professional career in the mid-20th century, and there are many of them. Stone has to fight for a fair contract. She doesn’t have access to the changing rooms and hotel rooms that her male teammates do. There’s a sweet romance that abruptly switches its tone when Stone’s husband decides he doesn’t want her playing ball anymore.
Diamond’s great skill here is making a baseball career that lasted less than five years, including a sole 50-game season with the Clowns, seem like a lifelong pursuit. We hear Stone memorizing baseball statistics as a child and rattling off how many different times she tried to play ball in her youth only to be dissuaded by her mother or other authority figures. We hear a litany of the awards she got in other sports and how little she cared for them because she wanted to play baseball. A whole lot of useful information about sports and culture gets shared in these scenes.
“Toni Stone” can be a dark, heavy, psychological drama, but Playhouse on Park also really tries to take you out to the ballgame. The opening “turn off your phones” announcement is recited as if by a radio sports announcer. Johann Fitzpatrick’s scenic design provides a realistic dugout and home plate/batter’s box set-up. The dimensions are askew, but so is the timeframe of the play, which shifts abruptly from the excitement of a game to inner reflections and flashbacks to uncomfortable confrontations with the sort of people who like to crush other people’s dreams.
Diamond is also smart in how she handles legends about Stone that may or may not be true. Many of the stories about Stone’s interactions with major male baseball players, a notable part of her legend, have not been substantiated. Diamond doesn’t pretend they happened. She treats them as the sort of self-inflating anecdotes people like to tell about themselves, and often has someone standing by to deflate the myth with a “Yeah, sure” attitude. It’s a good reminder that Stone was important because of who she was, not who she knew.
“Toni Stone” by Lydia R. Diamond, directed by Jamil A.C. Mangan, runs through June 16 at Playhouse on Park, 244 Park Road, West Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays at 2 p.m., Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. $45-$55, $42.50-$52.50 students and seniors. At 7 p.m. on June 11, the theater is hosting a panel discussion titled “On the Black: The History of Black Baseball.” playhouseonpark.org.
