ACT spotlights trailblazing female ballplayer
Play is a compelling portrait of a black woman fighting forces trying to hold her back
Live performances of “Toni Stone” have been canceled, but American Conservatory Theater is offering a streaming version of the play. Check with the theater company at 415-749-2228 or act-sf.org.
It’s rare for a show scheduled to run for a few weeks to close immediately after opening night, but that’s what happened with American Conservatory Theater’s West Coast premiere of “Toni Stone.” The opening proceeded on schedule last week, even though the same day other large theaters, such as The Curran next door and BroadwaySF’s Orpheum and Golden Gate, canceled shows after new state and local mandates on crowd sizes and social gatherings were ordered because of concerns about the coronavirus. The next day, ACT canceled live performances of “Toni Stone” and “Gloria” (at the Strand Theater). Since then, a Bay Areawide shelter-in-place order has shut down live entertainment. ACT is offering streaming versions of both “Toni Stone” and “Gloria”; check the website for information. The ACT production was a homecoming of sorts for the story of Toni Stone, who, in the 1940s, became the first woman to play professional baseball. An avid baseball player since her childhood in Minnesota, she started her professional career with the San Francisco Sea Lions, part of what was called the Negro Leagues. From 1954 on, she lived in Oakland and finally in Alameda, where she died in 1996. The play, by Lydia R. Diamond (author of “Stick Fly”), doesn’t cover the Bay Area connection at all. It consolidates the various teams Stone played for — the Sea Lions, the Black Pelicans, the New Orleans Creoles, the Kansas City Monarchs — into one team, the Indianapolis Clowns, a team she played with for about a year, to simplify the story and give it a more stable cast of characters. ACT artistic director Pam MacKinnon has been developing the piece with Diamond for years and directed its world premiere off-Broadway last year at Roundabout Theatre Company with the same creative team and a mostly different cast. The cast of nine mirrors the nine players on a baseball team, and when the performers play other characters, they usually just put other clothes over their baseball uniforms in Dede Ayite’s versatile costume design. Riccardo Hernández’s set of low bleachers and banks of floodlights similarly centers the game. The play is transparent about being a story told to an audience. As Stone narrates her life, she occasionally chides herself for forgetting to mention something, or tells other characters to stop intruding on scenes they weren’t present to witness. Dawn Ursula is an energetic presence as Stone, talking a mile a minute and rattling off baseball stats when she feels uncomfortable, which is often. She’s socially awkward and comically literal-minded, but mostly she’s single-mindedly and indefatigably devoted to her sport. Jarrod Smith is a glowering, ornery Woody, always fuming at the other players. Reprising their New York roles, Kenn E. Head is often hilarious as sardonic sex worker Millie, and Daniel J. Bryant is amusingly garrulous as the bookish Spec, who also has a fun running gag about his sexual prowess. Ray Shell is amiably low-key as Alberga, Stone’s patient suitor and eventual husband. Sean-Maurice Lynch is matter-of-fact manager Stretch and condescending team owner Syd Pollack. Rodney Earl Jackson Jr. is charmingly flirtatious as Elzie, JaBen Early is a playful King Tut, and Marquis D. Gibson is the comically gullible Jimmy. The play drives home both the ceaseless racism the team encounters everywhere it goes and the thick skin Stone has to maintain to be grudgingly accepted as one of the guys. At one point, the team’s ball playing morphs into a clownish dance, feverishly choreographed by Camille A. Brown, with the grotesque grins of performers desperate to please, indicting those who come to guffaw at the spectacle. It’s a compelling portrait of a player striving against a million forces doing their best to hold her back, and it’s a shame to see the show shut down as soon as it opened due to factors beyond anyone’s control.