Review: In ‘Toni Stone’ at Goodman Theatre, both tension and joy in story about baseball and racism

“We win,” says Toni Stone, “and we bring the show.”

Stone, the first of three Black women to play professional baseball full time for the Indianapolis Clowns in the 1950s, is talking about the Negro leagues, where playing serious ball coexisted uneasily with entertaining the crowd with a plethora of skill-based antics. The Clowns were not far removed from the Harlem Globetrotters and their white owner, Syd Pollock, even had a financial interest in those legendary entertainers.

As played with grit, determination and compassion by Tracey N. Bonner (it’s a breakout role for her), the hero of Lydia R. Diamond’s bracing, entertaining and meticulously researched biographical drama at the Goodman Theatre is a baseball nerd and savant, a tomboy of her own description and a serious player, even if the Clowns hired her mostly as a gimmick. She wants to win and her problem is not so much the pitcher or even the other team at all. It is her milieu — sexist, racist, and physically and mentally exhausting to navigate.

And yet, director Ron OJ Parson’s new production of this 2019 off-Broadway play exuberantly posits that it was still possible to find the joy of the beautiful game. In many ways, that’s the tension of the evening. The Negro league players (there are eight actors supporting Bonner’s narrating Stone) are stuck driving their own bus and walking into restaurants through the kitchen door and many of them had talents that exceeded those to be found during that era in the majors. But they still played and had fun and attracted big crowds. Parson’s productions are known for their pace and exuberance and “Toni Stone” bursts with the joys of life, even as it notes the racist perils of the era. Parson makes sure his audience appreciates the Black sporting life of the era in all of its vivacity, even if he sometimes has to take on a play anxious to conform to current political sensibilities to do so.

Plays about professional sports (and there have been many) are notoriously difficult to stage: since the games themselves are near-impossible to credibly re-create beyond a few recorded crowd noises and setups, these dramas tend to spend all their time on the sidelines or in the locker room, leaving the audience with the sense that they’re on the periphery of the main event. Of late, several progressive writers have begun to use sports outside the majors (such as women’s youth soccer) as a vehicle for exploring inequity. Indeed, the Goodman has two simultaneous productions at present with much the same theme and message: “the ripple, the wave that carried me home,” a play about racism and swimming, is running right next door to “Toni Stone,” a play about racism and baseball.

But “Toni Stone” also is about survival and learning to thrive. With the help of a hugely talented and live-wire cast (Kai A. Ealy, Joseph Aaron Johnson, Chiké Johnson, Travis A. Knight, Victor Musoni, Jon Hudson Odom, Matty Robinson, Edgar Miguel Sanchez and Terence Sims all support Bonner) Parson and Diamond figured out how to make their show pop like a zesty playoff, replete with bats flying through space and balls dropping from the sky. Parson here is superbly corporal, as exemplified by how we see the players, not just in their games, but strewn on the bus that serves as their home.

Bonner, though, is the main event; her character talks all night and barely leaves the stage and this extraordinarily well-rooted performance fights any tendency to make Stone the spokesperson for the playwright, even though Diamond clearly adores her subject. Bonner focuses on Stone as a kind of baseball savant, a realist who pushes on, fights on and asks for surprisingly little, given the level of her talent.

On Monday night, the Goodman’s audience, including the large Black audience that has supported (and been supported by) this theater for decades now, clearly had a blast, enjoying spending time in set designer Todd Rosenthal’s savvy recreation of a ballpark, as brought to sonic life by Andre Pluess.

“Toni Stone” is a bit too long and it struggles to maintain its dramatic pace in the first half of Act 2, partly because the theme gets restated one time too many and the hero isn’t working toward a specific goal beyond keeping on, keeping on as her body ages. But the show recovers, like a fit player re-energized by a doubleheader and Bonner, in particular, is so compelling and empathetic that you care deeply for the fate of this oft-overlooked Black sportswoman, born too soon for comfort and always having to navigate the high-wire of life with a circus going on below.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “Toni Stone” (3.5 stars)

When: Through Feb. 26

Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.

Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes

Tickets: $25-$80 at GoodmanTheatre.org and 312-443-3800.