“I am prone to ramblin’,” the titular protagonist of Toni Stone tells us. “Never could tell a story from beginning to end all nice and neat.” The warning arrives just minutes into Lydia R. Diamond’s new play but, alas, too late for any polite audience member already strapped in for what will feel like a ball game with too many extra innings—featuring talented players and offering moments of excitement and beauty, but overall too long and static.
That’s not an arbitrary metaphor. Marcenia Lyle Stone, our heroine’s given name, was a baseball player, and a very good one, becoming the first woman to play the game professionally as part of the Negro League in the 1940s and ’50s. Her story, predictably rife with struggles related to gender and race, would seem like great fodder for contemporary drama, and this world-premiere production boasts a top-flight director in Pam MacKinnon and a vibrant cast led by April Matthis in the title role.
Stone, based on Martha Ackmann’s Curveball, The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, begins promisingly, in fact, with Matthis introducing Toni as members of the otherwise all-male cast go through their characters’ pre-game motions, stretching, swinging and throwing in a graceful, vigorous pantomime choreographed by Camille A. Brown, known for her ravishing work on Choir Boy and 2017’s Broadway revival of Once On This Island. Matthis, who has a wonderfully elastic face and moves with an athlete’s sense of casual, contained power, manages to combine a wry quality with utter guilelessness; her Toni has no real agenda other than to play ball.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
“It’s not the thing itself, it’s the weight of it,” Matthis’s Toni explains, referring to a baseball with reverence and joy. “It’s how it feel, and how it fills what your hand was without it.” Diamond will return to this conceit repeatedly, and to that of “reaching,” which Toni is pressed to do in various capacities from childhood on. We learn that her parents discouraged their gifted daughter from pursuing her passion; decades later, Toni is courted by and eventually marries an older businessman, Alberga—described in Diamond’s character listings as “a young and sexy 63,” and played by Harvy Blanks with a street-smart suaveness—who’s not thrilled about sharing her with the sport.
Then there’s the coach who provides early encouragement, but later turns out to be a Ku Klux Klan member; the team owner who won’t pay Toni what she’s worth, and defies her efforts to play fair by having pitchers go easy on her; and her teammates on the Indianapolis Clowns, whose reactions to having a female colleague range from blithe teasing to simmering resentment that, in one case, boils over in a confrontation in which he threatens Toni with sexual violence.
It’s ripe subject matter, but over two acts that run two hours and change (not including an intermission), Diamond and MacKinnon sometimes fall back on clichés and, yes, rambling, diminishing its weight. The various exchanges between Toni and Albergus, however adroitly played, feel repetitive, revealing little that’s intriguing about the couple as individuals or their relationship once they’ve been established. The horrific racism endured by Toni, and her teammates, is portrayed in ways that can seem banal, or even petty; a youth league consisting of well-off white boys is cast as a group of hapless ninnies, and Clowns owner Syd Pollock, made both gruff and unctuous by Eric Berryman—one of several actors who juggle athlete characters with other roles—comes off as similarly cartoonish.
An unlikely bond forged between Toni and a prostitute named Millie, wittily played by Kenn E. Head, is mined with more depth and grace, and Matthis shares funny, poignant and bracing moments with other cast members, and in addressing the audience by herself. Even when Toni Stone sags, its central figure, as captured in this riveting performance, commands our attention.
Toni Stone opened June 20, 2019, at the Laura Pels Theatre and runs through August 11. Tickets and information: roundabouttheatre.org
