Toni Stone, History-Making Baseball Legend, Hits a Home Run on Stage
Toni Stone is an unjustly little known hero and trailblazer. The first woman to play professional baseball in the Negro Leagues of the 1940s and 1950s, she is now the subject of Lydia R. Diamond’s excellent play, produced by the Roundabout Theatre Company (Laura Pels Theatre, to Aug. 11), which uses its subject’s name succinctly as its title.
The beguiling magic of Toni Stone the play, directed by Pam MacKinnon (and based on Martha Ackmann’s 2010 biography, Curveball), is many-fold, but it is heralded by a charming and emphatic performance by April Matthis in the title role of Stone herself, and Diamond’s script, which has both a lightness of touch and resonant depth.
Matthis tells us Stone’s life story with a directness and wit. She has a charming, understated eccentricity, and it is a story that both interrogates the racism and sexism of the times, but also, and most memorably, Stone’s joy at playing the game. We begin the play with a beautiful meditation on how the ball feels when it lands in a glove.
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