Inside A.C.T.

By Claire L. Wong You still have the opportunity to watch  Toni Stone  from the comfort of your home. Those who have purchased tickets to  Toni Stone  will receive an email with access to the recording. If you missed your chance to purchase tickets, visit bit.ly/ACTStreaming to see our video streaming options, available for a limited time. A.C.T.’s Toni Stone choreographer Camille A. Brown is always reaching. She’s never giving up, and her rapidly expanding body of work proves it. The award-winning choreographer, director, and dance educator’s driving passion is to empower Black bodies to tell their stories in their own languages through movement and dialogue. The New York Times has called her “one of the most expressive, genuine and deeply felt choreographers working today.” Whether she’s exploring ancestral stories and sparking conversations with her dance company Camille A. Brown and Dancers, or choreographing Broadway productions such as Choir Boy , Once...

By A.C.T. Publications Staff Before Pam MacKinnon got a call from her friend Samantha Barrie in 2012, she had never heard of Toni Stone. Barrie, a theater producer and avid baseball fan, urged MacKinnon to read a biography published in 2010— Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League . MacKinnon found the book riveting. “It just works on so many different levels,” says the Tony Award winner and A.C.T. artistic director. “Historically, sociologically, and biographically.” Barrie purchased the rights from author Martha Ackmann, and MacKinnon approached playwright Lydia R. Diamond to dramatize the story of Toni Stone. “I had seen a few of Lydia’s plays,” says MacKinnon. “Even though we’d never worked together before, I felt like we shared the same theatrical sensibility. I felt that for this play to get written and produced, Lydia needed to write it. She can write really hard-hitting things that are also filled wit...

By Ted Sod Award-winning  Toni Stone  playwright Lydia R. Diamond grew up in a family of educators and musicians. She found playwriting in her third year at Northwestern while studying theater, and went on to act professionally for 10 years while writing and producing her own plays. It wasn’t until her first regional theater production of  The Gift Horse  at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, Diamond says, that she understood “I was happier and more adept at writing plays than being in them.” Toni Stone  premiered at Roundabout Theatre Company in 2019 before coming here to San Francisco. In addition to Toni Stone ,   Diamond’s playwriting career is expansive. Her other works include Smart People , Stick Fly (Broadway run at Cort Theatre), Voyeurs de Venus , Harriet Jacobs , and The Bluest Eye . She has also worked in television, and was a writer/ consulting producer for Showtime’s fourth season of The Affair , for which she was nominated for a Writer’s Guild ...