In a league of their own: Baseball player Toni Stone and Lady Macbeth take center stage

“Toni Stone” encourages its titular baseball phenom to aim for the fences, and actor Kenya Mahogany Fashaw does just that in the Aurora Fox production running through April 2. And she decidedly connects.

Playwright Lydia R. Diamond (and could a name resonate any better with a play about baseball?) pays homage to the first woman to play ball on a professional men’s team.

Fictional pitching ace Max Chapman in Amazon’s reboot of “A League of Their Own” is modeled on Stone, as well as Black ballplayers Mamie Johnson and Connie Morgan (and softball great Billie Harris). Diamond based the play on journalist and female-achievement chronicler Martha Ackmann’s biography “Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League.”

Toni cautions at the play’s start that she’s not one to tell a linear tale. “I’m prone to ramblin.’ Never could tell a story from beginning to end all nice and neat. My brain don’t work like that,” she confesses after launching the play with an impassioned ode to the baseball. A ball rolls toward her as if to punctuate the sentiment and then her teammates – the Indianapolis Clowns – take the stage. The play curves satisfyingly, touching on race and gender in the 1920s through the ‘40s.

There are nine actors in the cast, including Fashaw. It’s baseball after all. Dwayne Carrington, eden, Don Randle, Josiah Peters, Mykail Cooley, Chaz Grundy, Rashad Holland and Stevie Wise make up Toni’s raucous, entertaining team. It is a group rife with camaraderie, but also jealousies, conflicts and secrets.

Woody (Cooley) resents the successes of Jackie Robinson, but isn’t especially fond of Toni, either. Jimmy (Wise) gets razzed about his sexuality. Spec (Peters) is well-endowed intellectually but will have you know in other ways, too. A few of the actors also stand in for characters in Toni’s account of her life: her mother; an Irish priest who comes bearing good news; the white baseball team owner, Sydney Pollock; friend and confidant Millie; and her suitor and eventually her husband, Alberga.

Toni loves her sport, grasps its poetry. She speaks metaphorically and literally of the weight of the ball and the reach required to catch it but also to dream, hope and excel. When she’s flustered or unsure of herself, she recites stats – of which there is no shortage in baseball. When she’s conversing, she talks baseball. She feels about the game, she admits, the way a pretty girl who her mother wanted her to be friends with as a child felt about boys.

Barbed and amusing banter unfurls in the dugout, in the hometown watering hole, on the bus where the Clowns pretty much live from March to through October. But baseballs aren’t the only things hurled in the play. At an exhibition game pitting the Clowns against a white team (which the Clowns had been paid to lose to), racial epithets fly.

Director Kenny Moten does lovely physical work with the ensemble, choreographing their on-field athletics and goofball antics. They are players but also entertainers, as owner Syd — but also team jester King (Randle) — makes a point of. The sound design is strong. (On opening night, some of the sound cues competed with the dialog, but that may be the only error in the production and one easy to fix.)

The set by Brandon Philip Case can be a field or dugout, team bus or the local watering hole in the Clown’s hometown. With the able assistance of lighting designer Brett Maughan, stage right and stage left host scenes from Toni’s life: the meeting of her mother and a local priest; her courtship with Alberga (an aptly smooth Carrington); her friendship with Millie. One-name actor eden  delights as the Miss Mamie’s Gentleman’s Club veteran who befriends and emotionally coaches Toni.