Play - Martha Ackmann

The Story Behind How Curveball—the Book—
Became Toni Stone - the Play

Samantha Barrie has been a baseball fan forever. She even designs her daily routine around baseball, putting on make-up with an eye to the television and the latest major league news. One morning she was at the mirror and noticed an ESPN feature about a little-known baseball player named Toni Stone. The ESPN feature was about my book Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in Negro League. For almost as long as Samantha has been a baseball fan, she’s been involved in theatre, including work for The Public Theatre in New York and The Old Globe in San Diego. She’s worked on the production side with playwrights, directors, and actors – and always searched for a baseball story that needed telling.

That morning at the make-up mirror, Samantha found her story. In short order, she was in touch with my agents and all of us met at Joe Allen’s, that celebrated New York eatery for theatre folks. We talked about Toni, the core of her story, and were delighted to find ourselves on the same page about what Toni’s story represents. Soon Samantha commissioned the incomparable playwright Lydia Diamond to develop a script and brought on Tony award-winning director Pam MacKinnon.

All of us – we called ourselves Team Toni - worked together for almost nine years to bring the play to life. I had written Curveball when I was a Fellow in Non-Fiction at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute and Lydia Diamond had come to the Institute several years later. Over the course of the play’s development, Radcliife could not have been more supportive of the project and helped with workshops and conversation in Cambridge.

In the summer of 2019, Toni Stone premiered as a Roundabout Theatre production at the Laura Pels stage. We had a remarkable cast, and the play won several Obie Awards, including Best Actress for April Matthis. The Wall Street Journal named it the best new play of 2019.

Since the play’s premiere in New York City, Toni Stone has been produced all over the country by companies in Washington, D.C. San Francisco, Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Boston, Memphis, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Denver, and many more. In fact, Toni Stone continues to be produced and may be coming soon to a city near you.